> People don't want to feel judged, and people will assume you are judging them (not the core issue with misophonia)
Really? Scott Alexander had a response to this very article pointing out that judgment does indeed seem to be the core issue with misophonia ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-s... ):
> So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake [author of the Asterisk piece], but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.
> Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn’t go away. Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute.
> If you trick misophoniacs into thinking their trigger sounds are something else, they won’t get triggered. In this study, scientists played people who hated chewing sounds a video (with audio) of someone chewing; unsurprisingly, they hated it. Then they played them a video of someone walking on squelching snow, but the audio track was secretly actually the same chewing sounds. It looked like the snow was making the noise - now the misophoniacs didn’t hate it!
> some misophoniacs say that they’re only triggered by specific people - usually those close to them. If some rando chews loudly, they’ll be mildly annoyed; if their brother does, they’ll flip out. Probably there’s a reasonable explanation here too, but at this point maybe we should also be considering a larger-scale update.
> even as misophonia makes me miserable - even as I absolutely fail to overcome it - I can’t help feeling like it’s sort of fake. I’d already noticed something like the thing about people close to me. The way I thought of it was something about righteous anger. The sound of the wind in the trees barely bothered me at all, because there was no one to get angry at. Sounds that were natural parts of the social order were nearly as benign - I didn’t like hearing the bus driver announce the next stop, but it was an inevitable part of the bus-riding experience and I was resigned to it. But if a group of gangbangers scared the kids out of the nearby park and put on loud music while smoking drugs, I would go through the roof.
He doesn't actually make the connection, but the way he describes his own experience with misophonia is pretty much identical to the phenomenon of e.g. compulsively checking a Twitter feed from someone you hate.