Facebook
Twitter
Pocket
Reddit
Email
I once tried to make myself deaf,” is the title line of an anonymous Reddit post from January. In it, the poster described her experience with a condition known as misophonia, which causes people to have intense emotional reactions to certain everyday sounds, such as other people chewing, drinking, or sniffing. “I’m very sensitive to clicking (pens, nails tapping, etc.) and also to mouth sounds in general, mostly smacking lips and loud eating,” she wrote. At age 6 or 7, she felt so disturbed by the sound of her mother eating, that she tried to stick her father’s screwdriver in her ear, “far enough to make myself deaf.” Fortunately, she was unsuccessful. “I know, it’s horrifying,” she wrote, “but I was already so done at that age.”
Scientists are only beginning to understand what can account for such extreme responses to non-threatening sounds. Though misophonia is estimated to affect up to 18 percent of the population—the Reddit board for misophonia has 80,000 users—a name for the condition wasn’t officially coined until 2001.
“Historically, people thought of misophonia as an auditory processing disorder because the general focus is on sound,” says Joel I. Berger, a neuroscientist who studies misophonia at the University of Iowa. But he and others believe the condition may be shaped more by the social context in which those sounds occur. Berger recently co-authored a review of existing behavioral and neuroimaging literature that argues that misophonia is actually a disorder of social cognition, the process of perceiving, analyzing, and understanding the behaviors, emotions, and intentions of others.
Sounds tend to be most troubling when they are generated by other humans.
That human responses to sound can be shaped by our perception of its source is not a new idea. Over a decade ago, for instance, researchers reported that healthy study participants exposed to recordings of unpleasant sounds, such as nails on a chalkboard, found them less aversive—and showed lower skin conductance response, a proxy for arousal—when they were told they were listening to a piece of music.
For those with misophonia, sounds tend to be most troubling when they are generated by other humans. The authors of one preprint Berger and his colleagues reviewed found that participants with misophonia rated human eating sounds more aversive than animal ones. Other studies they analyzed suggest that the strength of a sufferer’s emotional reaction varies based on their relationship to the person making the sound.
“It’s often close family members that produce the strongest reaction,” says Berger. “All these processes that are hyperactivated in misophonia are very much related to how we create social bonds.”
Neuroimaging studies suggest an explanation for the condition may lie in certain areas of the brain responsible for both perception of sounds and understanding social relationships. One study from 2019 found that the parts of the auditory cortex activated by trigger sounds in people with misophonia are ones involved in the perception of motion, language, faces, and the mind states of others: the posterior superior temporal gyrus and sulcus.
Other imaging studies have shown that trigger sounds tend to activate the motor cortex in people with misophonia, says Berger, and that the brains of people who have the condition feature stronger connections between the auditory and motor cortices compared with control subjects. This supports Berger’s hypothesis: The motor cortex is responsible for our perception of physical movement, both our own and that of others, and plays an important role in our ability to understand behaviors and intentions of the people around us.
Berger proposes that people with misophonia may have heightened unconscious awareness of the movements of others, that these movements may be overrepresented in the brain relative to their own movements. Such a mismatch could make them feel an uncanny lack of control over their own bodies, he suggests, which could cause emotional anguish. It would help explain a surprising tendency among people with misophonia: They often unconsciously mimic the actions underlying the troubling sound, chewing, or sniffing in unison with the other person. The mimicry could potentially provide some relief by helping them reassert control over their brains’ representations of these movements, Berger says.
“The review is largely theoretical,” says Giulia Poerio, a psychologist who researches sensory perception at the University of Sussex, “but the model they’ve proposed is an excellent starting point for testing specific hypotheses … As researchers, we shouldn’t be thinking about misophonia as purely a sound sensitivity disorder.”
Poerio believes reframing misophonia as a disorder of social cognition could help scientists come up with novel treatments. Current therapies—such as tinnitus retraining therapy, where patients are repeatedly exposed to triggers to reduce their conditioned response, along with various antidepressant and anxiolytic medications—do not typically take social context into account.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a common treatment for depression and anxiety, has also been found effective for misophonia. This approach often focuses on reframing negative thoughts that rise in response to distressing sounds, but Berger suggests that future CBT interventions could instead teach patients to cognitively reassess the context in which the sounds are heard.
People with misophonia are rarely upset by the sounds they themselves make, which others sometimes use to discredit the disorder. “I have no problem sitting in my kitchen eating an apple,” explains Cris Edwards, who leads a misophonia advocacy organization called SoQuiet. “But if I was in the room with somebody while they’re eating an apple, I would have to leave. That doesn’t make any sense.”
As for the Reddit poster, she said that her symptoms diminished significantly when she moved out of her childhood home, away from the offending sounds and the person who made them. “Now I’m much better being out of that house,” she wrote. 
Lead image: The Zia Zio Land / Shutterstock
Get the Nautilus newsletter
Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers.
