The Rest Is Science - Why Loud Chewing Makes You Angry

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

The mukbang phenomenon is comfort viewing for millions, yet for others the sound of chewing, slurping and everyday mouth noises is enough to trigger instant anger, disgust and distress. Why do the sounds soothe one person and enrage another? In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) explore misophonia, the misunderstood sound sensitivity that can turn everyday mouth sounds into powerful emotional triggers. 1 in 5 people in a UK study have reported a hatred of mouth sounds, but where does the problem lie, and can you train your brain to stop hating a sound, or is the person chewing next to you simply beyond forgiveness? Are the sounds themselves the trigger? Or is the structure of the human ear to blame? Perhaps, instead, the answer lies in a surprising connection between our brains and our jaws. To find out, Hannah and Michael trial a surprising trick that could offer genuine relief, and discover how changing what you see can completely transform your response to what you hear. Along the way, they investigate nails on blackboards, the frequencies used in acoustic weapons, the device designed to drive teenagers out of public spaces and the curious connection between misophonia, ASMR and the mukbang world itself. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Frye. And I'm Michael Stevens. And this is an episode that some of you will hate. It's a good way to draw people in, I think, isn't it? It's a good way to be like, welcome. Welcome, you'll hate this. Michael, I asked you to prepare some crisps or chips since you're in America in advance of this episode. Do you have some there? Yeah. I did get some, which is great because I'm a little bit hungry.

I didn't get chips. I got America's number one finger hat. bugles because I kind of know what you're going to talk about I needed something crunching so we're talking about misophonia today we're talking about the abject horror and rage that is

that there appears in some people when they over here other people eating you mean like this what I want you to do do how is that for you Michael how is that for you it doesn't annoy me I can tell that like the smacking it's probably more gross and annoying than the crunching.

I don't know if you feel that way. It's hard for me. I think it sounds fine. Do you think it sounds fine? Okay, that was you doing it. Yeah, let me listen to you. Okay, so the initial crunch was kind of cool, but then once you closed your lips and it became like a sound that was muffled by your own head,

it felt really personal. Like I shouldn't be hearing it. And that's when I stopped liking it as much. Okay, so here's what we're saying. You were fine with it when you were doing it. I was fine with it when I was doing it, but it's when the other person is doing that it's really a problem. It feels like an inappropriate sound.

I don't know, maybe I'm revealing something about myself, but yeah, what's going on? It's just, it's not nice. It's not nice. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. What is misophonia? Where does it come from? Why do you have it? And what can you possibly do to make the anger go away?

Hmm, get the popcorn ready. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Do you remember when we discussed why feet are so weird? Well, one particular footbone holds an even stranger surprise. It's helping shape our understanding of cancer timelines. And for that, we're going to need to go all the way back, before Neanderthals even existed, to a 1.7 million-year-old foot bone. Researchers have identified a tumor in it in the oldest, known,

example of cancer in people. Which really shows that cancer is far from a modern disease. Beating a disease so deeply rooted in our biology won't happen overnight. But today, cancer research UK scientists are discovering incredible ways to turn our biology against cancer. In fact, Cancer Research UK has helped double UK cancer survival over the past 50 years. And their world-class research is driving even more discoveries to tackle over 200 types of cancer. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them,

visit canterreseachuk.org, forward slash rested science. Right now, for a limited time, everyone's part of the Buick team, even you. Buick's employee pricing for you event is on now. Get a purchase credit of up to $3,168 on a 2026 Buick Envision. Surround yourself with signature Buick refinement from an available massaging driver's seat to an expansive panoramic moonroof and a stunning ultra-wide 30-inch diagonal screen.

Don't miss Buick's employee pricing for you event. Visit buick.ca for more details. Insurance is entering a new era. Policyholders expect a fast and flexible experience from the insurers they trust. That's why modern insurers run on Adion. From effortless premium collections to instant claims payouts,

Adion's single platform, your entire policy lifecycle. A single platform to reduce churn and claims fraud. Drive revenue. Stay in control of how your money moves. Adion, fintech built for your next move. Okay, well, let's start off with some noises that are horrible, shall we? Some noises that make people annoyed.

Because there's plenty of those. There's lots of evidence on this. Charles Babbage, who we were talking about the other day, he really disliked bad noises. Do you know about this story already? No idea, no. Okay, so Charles Babbage is the guy who invented the analytical engine, the difference engine, like this really amazing inventor.

He kept a tally of the street music outside of his window in Marlabel in London. He calculated they had 165 interruptions in 80 days, and he was fuming. His neighbours found out that it annoyed him to have music playing. They deliberately started playing more and more sound outside of his window just to annoy him more and more and more. That's terrible. I don't like music coming from far away. Hold on, I got a bugle stuck in my throat. It's especially annoying because the lower frequency sounds travel further.

So I don't get to hear the nice song. I just hear boob-bobo-bo-bo-bo. And it's like, stop it. Just irritating noises that you have no control over. That's how we felt as well. This is a time, by the way, when street music was actually an extortion trade. So you would turn up and you would play. outside a nice house until somebody paid you to stop and to move on.

Oh my gosh. Sort of like the weapon itself was the music in the street. Yeah, Porra Babbage. He wrote this chapter on street nuisances and kind of became well known for absolutely despising noises outside of his window, which then led to people deliberately playing tin music, tin whistles, brass band for like hours outside of his window just to wind him up. Mike, I didn't know this about him. I mean, he would need to just move to the middle of nowhere.

To the middle of nowhere, to the middle of nowhere. Yeah, like, it just, you can't, you kind of, the only way I've been able to get over my sensitivity to, like, all these noises is to just be like, that is what it is to live in a city. And I love that I live here in London or New York City or wherever, and that's just part of it. And I just have a Zen experience. It doesn't really bother me, actually.

The noises of the outside are kind of going part. the window or whatever, they don't really bother me that much. There has been some work into the physics of horrible noises. Like, what is it about certain noises that everybody distinctly dislikes? And the classic one is nails down a blackboard, okay? Yeah, that's the absolute epitome of this, of misophonia. Right, so I'm going to send you, I'm going to send you a link to a website right now. This is from Boombox Post, okay? They have done some tweaking. on sounds that are universally horrible. Okay, so here is fingers on a chalkboard.

I'm sorry everybody, but I'm going to play it. Fingers on a chalkboard, can you hear that? I'm going to hit play. Oh, yeah. Wow, that's really bad. It's really bad. It's really bad. There's also styrofoam squeak.

I've listened to this. Okay. Oh, yeah. Horrible. Plate squeak. Oh, man. Okay. I mean, there's lots of like squeaky things.

I think figure nails on a chalkboard in real life is worse for me, but the plate squeak one that plays on this website is the worst so far. In the nails example, this amplitude can be like flickering 30 to 150 times a second. So it's really fast. It's not so slow that you can be like, ah, on off, on off. But it's like we know that that is something that we find unpleasant. Let me do marker squeak. The marker squeak one is very unpleasant.

Like, I think in real life I would like it better, but something about how it's coming through the speakers on my laptop here is just... I love how terrible this is because this is a perfect demonstration of what you're talking about. It is. It's just absolutely horrifying, right? So back in the 80s, there were three scientists, Halpern, Blake, and Hillenbrand, and they were like, what is it about fingernails on a blackbird that is so horrible? Like, what physically is it about this sound, about this audio wave, right, that is causing a... us to just recoil in so much horror. So what they did is they stripped out the low frequencies

and they found that it was improved. They stripped out high frequencies and they realized that it kind of stayed kind of hideous. Volume, by the way, made no difference here. But everybody's instinct that it was the shrillness, the very top high notes that were causing people to recoil, didn't really stand up. That is surprising.

I would have said, obviously, it's the high, pitchness. But no, they took that out and it was still bad. What has been done since, in 2011, there was a replication of this study. And what they did is they realized that it's actually the band between 2,000 and 4,000 hertz. So also on that page that I've sent you, on the right hand side, is exactly those same sounds, but this time where they've stripped out anything in that range. Okay, so just to put this into context, human hearing, ranges from 20 to 20,000 hertz. And what they're removing is the 2,000 to 4,000 range.

Exactly. So a little chunk right in the middle. I'll do chalkboard first. Okay, let me compare it to the original because it's still kind of bad. Oh, yeah. I just played the original. I'm going to do the plate squeak, which I hated the most. Cool. Oh, the plate squeak is almost so cute.

It could be a notification on your operating system. The marker squeak is like a cute mouse once it's been equalized. So it's really good to play them back to back. So for example, the styrofoam squeak where this band has been taken out and then the original. Okay, so here's with the band removed. And here's the original. Horrible. Horrible. And it does.

I mean, it's still recognizably the same. And it's not like it all of a sudden becomes a really nice sound, but it just becomes more tolerable. It doesn't have quite the same sort of blood-curdling nature as previous. So the thing that's interesting about that particular band, 2000 to 4,000, two things are interesting. One, it's about the same range that human screams are, like babies crying, children screaming, people like, you know, literally a blood-curdling scream is within that range. So it might be that there's some evolutionary aspect of this. I mean, that's speculation.

But the other thing about this is that your ear canal is complicit in all of this because around 3,000 hertz, the structure of your ear canal, those sounds will start to resonate within it. Oh. So they are vibrating your whole head, essentially, at that particular frequency, which is not going to add to it feeling way more horrible. 3,000 hertz sounds like this. Yeah, that's like an alarm sound.

Again, it's like a sound that we know people cannot ignore. Whether it's a crying baby or an alarm, that's the 3,000 hertz. And you're making exactly the right point about the alarm here, because this is where sirens, car alarms, you know, smoke detectors, you know, industrial, all of those kind of things, they are deliberately put in this range where, It doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing. You are sitting up and paying attention

when you hear something that is in that exact range. But these sounds are so horrible to us, right? And this is essentially universal that we all really dislike something in that range, that people have come up with acoustic weapons that exploit this fact about human nature. So there's one in particular that's called the long-range acoustic device.

It is this dish that fires off, this really horrible sound. It sounds like a really horrible, horrible, horrible alarm. It's like a 30-degree beam, kind of like sprays it out. And it sits between 2,100 and 3,100 hertz, which is exactly the bit that resonates within your ear canal. One of the things about this acoustic weapon, though, I should add, is that it is insanely loud. I mean, loud enough to destroy eardrums. There have been examples where it has been successfully used to deter people. So, I think my favorite example that I managed to find was in 2005, off the coast of Somalia, there was a pirate ship that was attacking a cruise ship.

Pirates were sort of trying to come aboard this cruise ship. And they had machine guns, they had like rockets, all of this stuff. So instead, the crew got out this loudspeaker, this like acoustic weapon, blared it down. And the pirates was like, do you know what, actually, I'm all right, Franks, don't want to? Don't think I will. Wow. I don't know I come on board. Yeah. Yeah. Which is really, I think. You're fighting, you're fighting not with physical harm or physical objects, but with annoyance.

Discomfort. I love that you've got an acoustical weapon and you're like, hey, what kind of ammo do you got? Well, I got a 40 hertz. No, that's too pleasant. I've got the Spice Girls want to be. Nah, it's still too good. Oh, I've got a 3,000 hertz sine wave. Yeah, that'll get them. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I mean, talking about Spice Girls wouldn't be actually. I mean, there have been instances where songs like pop songs have been used as torture devices. You play it over and over and over and over again. And people just lose their minds. I mean, really, really, really, really distressing. And incredibly quickly can be distressing incredibly quickly.

One other example, there's something called the Mosquito. Have you come across this? Yes, I have. Yeah. Go on, you tell it. You say it. Okay, so I was in Jacksonville, Florida, doing a brain cancer. handy live show. And outside the theater, they were playing this noise that was very annoying,

but all these, like, union workers were hanging outside. And I'm like, what is that noise? And they were like, oh, you can hear it. That noise is here to keep young people away. You could hear it. And I could hear it. And back then I was in my 30s. So I was really proud. And I looked like I was 74, just like I do now, but my ears could hear this sound, and it kept away like teenagers, basically. I should go back and see if I can hear it today now that I'm 40. But yeah, they were all just hanging out, no kids in sight, because it drove away and annoyed

anyone who was under a certain age, because as you get older, you can't hear those higher pitches. Exactly. So this is set at 17.4 kilohertz, really loud as well, 108 decibels. It's just like, oh, really too much. I have lost that level of my hearing. I've never been able to hear the mosquito. By the time it came around, I was already a bit hard of hearing, I guess. Actually, you're not missing much.

Yeah, okay, fair. But, I mean, the idea of this was that it could be sold to shopkeepers who wanted to disperse teenagers so that paying adults could come in and they'd be unaffected. But the thing is is that what actually happened? I'm really on teenager's side on this one. I've got to be honest, because the idea of making a space. not welcoming to young people just bothers me as to say a general rule.

The idea that you cannot physically exist in this public space and we're going to make it really, really bad for you. The idea that every young person is a delinquent also, just an extremely bothers me. Anyway, what teenagers did is within a year, they lifted the same tone and then they turned it into a text alert that teachers wouldn't be able to hear. Oh, that's clever. It's really smart. They could be talking to each other in class through Morse code beeps of mosquito sounds.

Just as 17 kHz that no one knows going to hear, which I think is very fun. So, gosh, 17 kilohertz, that's really high. Can I play that with that tone generator we're using? I mean, you can't. It goes all the way up to 20,000. So at 17,000 hertz. Oh, can I hear it? Oh, can I hear it?

Probably not. Here we go. I'm going to hit play. I've got nothing. I hear nothing. Now, it could be that my laptop can. I can't play that sound, but it's probably that I'm too old. I'll have to show this to my daughter.

Just that of interest, what level can you hear at? Okay, let me bring it down while it's playing. Oh, okay. I can hear it at 14,381. Ooh, if I go a little lower than that, it's really obvious. So I'd say the threshold is 14.3 kilohertz. What about you? I think it's, I think it's about 14 for me.

1426, I can just hear something. Okay. So it could, now it could be. be that that's the threshold for our computer speakers. We need like an actual ear doctor to tell us if we're doing this right. What the limit is, is it the machine or the ear? But anyway, yeah, I can't hear 17 kilohertz at all. I'm also two years older than you though. So, you know, let's assume that it's an extremely precise way that our ears have aged in that exactly. We have very special ears, yeah. Very special ears, exactly. Okay, so here's the thing. There's

definitely a particular sound wave or particular sound waves that we don't like. This, though, actually does not correlate with misophonia. Misophonia is something separate. The sound of people chewing and eating is particular and distinct. And we know that it doesn't have to do with volume. It doesn't have to do with that frequency. It doesn't have anything to do with roughness either. So sort of how lower frequencies, if the sound is a bit more jagged, which is what you did in an episode. No, what is this roughness you're talking about? One of the big things about the reason why chalkboard sounds so horrific is because what your nails are doing is they're sort of leaving and then rejoining the surface of the chalk bed. They're kind of, they're jittering all the way down.

And so what that means is that you're getting this, this peak in amplitude as it goes down, right? That's all it takes. Yeah. It's, you know, chewing, the sound of chewing, the sound that we started this episode with is just like, like, I mean, it's about as menacing as a cardigan in comparison to the other things that we've been describing. There've been experiments where you take people who are misophonics, I think they're called, people who have misophonia, and you ask them to rate screams and crying babies, and they don't like the sounds, but they don't like it just as much as everybody else doesn't

like it. But there is something that happens with a certain number of people where the sound of people chewing, sound of people eating food is so burdensome, so unbelievably difficult for them to hear, that they end up avoiding certain situations as a result. There was a UK study on this that estimated 18.4% of people carry misophonia symptoms that are burdensome enough to sort of to count as symptoms. So that's one in five people, basically. If you're sitting at a table, eating your food with five other people, chances are one of them is absolutely despising your chewing sound. Yeah, yeah. That's, I don't think I qualify for like a debilitating case of misophonia, but I do dislike chewing. Now, here's the thing, though, and I might be kind of like jumping

ahead a little bit, but disgust must be involved. The sound of chewing is not, resonating in my ear canal or my skull. It's not really loud. So I should say, actually, I'm going to focus on the hatred of listening to chewing. Misophonia is more generally the hatred of sound. So misos is hatred and phone is sound. And the term was coined in 2001, which I think is actually pretty late. But some people really do intensely suffer from misophonia in a way that actually affects their lives. I'll tell you, and I don't, she might not listen to this episode, but the sound of my mother chewing is really intolerable to me. Interesting. Particularly in that. But also, next on the list after my mother is my own chewing, but it's different. For me, the sound of my own chewing

isn't annoying, it's embarrassing. I am just panicked that other people will hear my chewing and they'll hate me. So I don't eat crunchy snacks around people and often if I'm sitting too close to people at a meal I will just go and eat outside or something because I don't I cannot chew around them. I'm too self-conscious but it's not debilitating and no one's ever been like like that time when we we went for lunch together and you got up and walked out and all of us looked at each other and said wow that was loud. Okay that now that didn't happen. I think I'm joking. I think I I think it's unreasonable. I don't, I think I chew like a normal person, but I think that... You do, you do, you do. To be clear, I've eaten in the room with Michael many times, and he's

completely normal. It's a completely normal, but I can't help that I feel just, like, I myself am being embarrassingly disgusting, no matter what. So I try to, I try to just like take a bite and then soak it in spit until it's soft enough that it doesn't make a noise. And now it makes it sound like I'm really losing my mind over this, but anyway. No, no. No. No. No, it doesn't. The one I'm really paranoid about is when I'm doing audio recordings. And sometimes your mouth can be a bit clicky. Like, oh, yeah. And I really hear it in other people. If I'm watching TV and it's just like, oh, gosh, that is a bit much for me. But I'm extremely paranoid about sounding clicky on tape.

Yeah. Okay. I know what you're talking about. I feel like, yeah, these are things that I notice in other people and then I hyper-notice them in myself. For me, it's if it's too wet right above just behind my front top teeth and I'm kind of my S's are kind of slippery and wet, then I get really, I have to go get a paper towel and dry the top of my mouth off. Oh my gosh, you fool being. I'll listen to the footage back and I'll just be disgusted and I'm like, I can't put this video out. Oh, man, oh man. They're like the perils of recording yourself. Do you know what?

I do think in general it is not healthy to have to watch yourself. on screen as much as we have to with I do. It's a weird, it's a weird experience. Yeah. It does make you very aware of, or at least more aware of how you appear to other people, probably. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

But again, hyper-aware. Most people don't care. They're not thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves. But, yeah, when you watch yourself on video over and over again, you're like, wow, okay. So that hair is weird. Okay. So that nostril is weird.

Yes. I won't even tell you the things that I hyper-focused on on my face. But because then speaking them out loud will make them true. But yes, I agree. It's the point. Yes, I agree. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. When we talk about beating cancer, we often focus a lot on survival.

And that can mean overlooking impacts that last long after treatment ends. Yeah, for example, take cancers in children and young people. The treatments themselves can be incredibly harsh. They can cause lifelong side effects like infertility or hearing loss. And Cancer Research UK is working to change that because young people, they should be able to grow up hearing the voices of the people that they love and living their lives to the fullest. That's right. And one clinical trial led by Cancer Research UK showed that giving another drug alongside chemotherapy nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing. And today, the treatment combination is being used by doctors across the world.

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org slash rest is science. The Royal Canadian Legion is celebrating its 100th anniversary. And now our change has a $2 coin to mark this milestone. Honor the Legion's mission to carry forward stories of service and sacrifice to new generations, and their dedication to supporting veterans and their families from coast to coast to coast. Celebrate this enduring legacy. Find the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Legion $2 coin today.

Okay, so I think disgust does come into it, but people who are really, really have misophonia, there have been investigations into what it is about them that makes them really, really strong. struggle with these kind of sounds in a way that is beyond what normal people would find difficult or disgusting or whatever it might be. There was a group in Amsterdam who took 109 people who have misphonia and they checked their hearing and it was like, no, the hearing is fine. You know, one of them had tinnitus, you know, whatever, but basically they were all completely normal. Yeah, so it's not the sound itself. It's not the physics of the sound itself. It's not the ears of the person.

And what people think it might have to do with is what's going on in your brain as you are watching somebody eat food. So, okay, if you watch somebody yawn, I mean, it doesn't, you don't need me to tell you how, how contagious yawning can be, right? You watch somebody, your jaw kind of mirrors what they're doing, and then before you know it, you're actually yawning. Even talking about yawning is making me feel this reflex. Like you're sort of sympathetic. Yeah. Yeah. I read to my daughter every night and if a character in the book yawns, I wind up actually yawning.

But after the character has, so I can't even use my real yawn to perform the character's yawn. And it's because you're mirroring, you're mirroring what's going on in others, even if it's just an image of that that appears in your head. So there is one theory that says misophonia is. kind of like contagious yawning, but it's for chewing. So this is a paper that was in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2021. And the idea, they put people in brain scanners, people who had misophonia, and then they played the sounds out and then looked to see what was going on in their brains as they were hearing and being disgusted and angered by these noises. And the hearing part of the brain behaved completely normally. It was sort of reacted as it would to any other sound.

But the difference was in the ventral pre-motor cortex. Basically, it's in the part of your brain that plans a movement before you make it. Oh. And specifically, the part that handles your lips, your jaw, and your throat. So it's essentially like your own mouth's control panel. Right. So the idea here then is that in misophonics, right, people have misophonia, what they're doing is they're seeing people chewing and they're sort of,

the bit of their brain that wants to mirror what's going on there is like is is is kicking off and is like doesn't like it in some early form mirroring the motion they aren't actually physically moving the muscles to mirror it but something about the the mirroring happening at a deep level yeah but then and that's what causes the discomfort so they call it hyper mirroring this is the the paper called it hyper mirroring but what this means is that it's like it's Almost that it runs as an intrusion in your brain. So you can hear the sound, that's fine. But it's like it's as though something else is instructing your body to do something that doesn't really want to do. Right.

Oh. So that's pointing again towards, in my opinion, a kind of disgust. Because fundamentally disgust is about a fear of invasion of something contagious that can spread out of your control that's external, getting into your body. bad smells, bad odors, gross things. But if something's infected me, meaning it's controlling the mirror neurons in my brain and I'm hyper-mirring a thing that I haven't decided to do, how is that different than me feeling like,

ooh, that mold is going to get on me and in me? Yeah, yeah. I mean, good point. I totally agree. But this, I think, gives the clue or a hint as to how you can tackle combat misophonia. Okay, yeah, what do we do about it? Because this same paper,

when they were talking to all these people had misophonia, they discovered that nearly half of them, actually to try and get around it, they sort of mimic what they're watching. And when they do, they end up getting a little bit of relief. So if you're watching somebody eating and it's really bothering you, if you start deliberately moving your jaw, it can take away some of the horror for you

because then you're sort of consciously performing the action that is already being invaded. Right. I'm going to try that next time. Well, let's try it now. Let's try it now. Try it now. Get your crisp.

You did not like hearing my crisp. I did not like hearing your crisp. I think here's what I'm going to try to do. I'm not going to just chew when you chew. I'm going to try to chew in sync with you. Yes. Because even if I'm eating and someone else is eating, they can gross me out.

But if I try to match the motions to their sounds, maybe that'll help. Exactly. We'll try and match it together. By the way, if you're watching... Which, watching this, which I, which, it's not just you and me alone here. Michael, there's quite long people watching. If you want to do this with us and see if the misophonia goes away, then do.

Grab yourself from Chris, super quick. Okay, ready? Hannah's going to lead, so I'm following her lead. Okay, okay, ready? That was fine. It's kind of funny to focus on your mouth so closely while I'm eating for a whole different reason than misophonia. But it definitely wasn't annoying because, first of all, it was harder for me to

hear your sounds. I'm going to turn the volume up. Let's do it again. Go on. Let me join you out. I'll try and make it really, really like lip smacking this time. Okay. Okay. It's fine. It's kind of, it's kind of cool. It's like, it's very corporal. Like, I'm very aware of bodies at this moment because I'm just like, I'm not seeing on yours so much and I've got all this stuff in my mouth. But it's not, it's not annoying. It's not gross. No, it's not annoying. And I mean, I'm sure it was for everybody else listening, but I think if you replay that and do it with us, then you'll hear. It does really genuinely feel quite different. And the idea here then is that what your brain is doing all the time is sort of subtracting your own, your own actions from your

kind of conscious awareness. And so, I mean, you have to, right? You're not, the world doesn't like lurch from one direction to another as your eyes are darting around. Sort of like it all adds to this kind of sensible picture. You don't, you know, as you say, you don't, you can't smell the inside of your nose, you can't taste the inside of your mouth, you're sort of deleting your experience. And so if your experience is synchronized with another person's, then you're sort of deleting their experience too. Yes, that's exactly how it felt. In fact, it almost felt like I was controlling your jaw. Uh-huh. Right. And that was not weird to me at all. I mean, it was not neutral. It was, again, it wasn't pleasant or unpleasant, but it was not gross in the

same way of like listening to your chewing. How dare you? How dare you call my chewing gross? I mean, it was less gross. Your chewing was like not that gross. But still, I deleted it. It's pretty great. It basically wasn't an external thing.

The next time we're in a room together and we're having a meal together, Michael, I'm going to lock eyes with you. And we should sink and start chewing again. Yeah. Yeah. I would like that. Okay. One other thing about this, a different study that I think is super interesting. that really demonstrates that so much of this is about context

rather than the actual sound itself is another experiment. Okay, so what I want you to watch here is just this lovely little video. We'll put it on the screen as well. Have a little watch of this video with the sound up if you could. Okay, I'm going to hit play. Okay, so I watched it, and I don't have a lot to report. It seems like the sound is not quite right. It's like a liquid being sucked through a straw or something

But what I'm seeing is a quickly running stream over rocks with a grassy bank Were you horrified by the sound? Were you horrified by another? No, but it was fine. No, not at all. I mean, it was a bit weird, but it's okay. Okay, now watch this video. Oh, yeah.

Okay, so now I'm watching this is the same sound, but I'm looking at a guy slurping through a straw. out of a paper cup. Way grosser. Okay. Way grosser. It's, okay. I don't want to say it's grosser,

but it's suddenly so much more annoying. So what this group did, this is Sam Amit and Davidenko's lab at Santa Cruz. They built this database of sound swapped videos. So they played certain sounds, so somebody sucking a drink for a straw. And then they asked people what they could hear. And most people got it right,

but some people would get it wrong. And they were like, oh, is that a babbling bro? And they used those wrong guesses to go and film a more positive version of the same sound and then kind of replaced one for the other. Now here's the thing that's really interesting. If I show you the positive video first, even though the sound is from something that would annoy you, the sound is people slurping, knives tapping, paper, like fingernails down black, was that kind of thing. even though it's something that would really bother you,

when you see it with a different image, actually, and they tested this on people who had misophonia, it just doesn't really bother them as much at all. Yeah. Do you want to see another one? There's loads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really impressive because I knew

watching the stream visual that the sound was liquid through a straw, but it still wasn't rising to the level of, why is he doing this? But as soon as I saw the actual correct visual of a guy slurping matched with the sound. It was, I felt like my privacy was being invaded by something very personal of his.

So what's interesting about this? Okay, so I'm going to show you again. I'm going to show you a positive one first. Here's the positive version of the video. All right, so I'll describe, oh, this looks like it's going to be a video of puppies in a cage. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, okay, so first of all, the puppies are like barking,

and it's just so cute. But yet, I have a suspicion that it's actually the sound, not of a little yip from a tiny puppy, but like a marker on a dry erase board. You're very close. You're very close. It's someone cleaning a scream in a really annoying way. Oh, yeah. So here's the original video, and I can see the window. Oh, yeah. As soon as they rub the cloth on the glass, and I hear that sound, I go, ooh, I recoil.

Horrified. But when it was a little puppy's bark. I was like, oh my gosh, that little dude. Okay, so the really interesting thing about this study is not only did it demonstrate that the annoyance of the sound is really context dependent. But if you show the horrible video first, the effect of trying to undo it by showing the positive video afterwards is nowhere near as strong. Right. You have to show the positive video first. So let me demonstrate this for you.

Okay, so here is another one. Okay, so... This is quite a visual thing, I'm sorry. I'm sorry everybody who's trying to listen to this. But if you just glance at your screen, you'll see the horror. I'm going to do my best to describe this. So the thumbnail of the video you sent me is already like a close-up of a woman's mouth. It looks unfortunate.

I'm going to hit play. Yeah, great. Now I've got this on my phone. It's someone chewing with their mouth basically open. And there's like goop everywhere. Fantastic. I can't wait to explain this to my wife. Genuinely horrifying.

Okay, so now let me show you the positive video. Now it looks like it might even be the same person. Oh, ringing out a towel. She's wringing water out of a wet towel, twisting it in her hands. And the drips of water are mimicking. They're synced up with the sound of the chewing effects. And it's, well, okay, now that I'm listening more closely, it is, it is, I can tell it's the wrong sound because it's too goopy and mushy for drops of water. Do you want to try one more?

Because I think when you watch the positive ones first, you're like, okay, this doesn't match, but it's fine. But I think when you watch, I mean, and this is the same as they found in the study, that the effect of the positiveness is not as positive if you already know where it came from, if you know that it came from. Yeah, so do another one, and this time I won't talk over it the first time I'll listen. Okay, so this is a video of someone tapping a fork on a ceramic plate, creating a quite unpleasant noise. Now, send me the positive visual matchup. Okay, so now I'm watching the same sound, but it's synced up to a visual of coins being dropped into a jar of coins. So every time the fork times tap the plate, what I'm seeing is a coin falling in. on top of some other coins.

Honestly, I mean, I got to say, Hannah, I still find the positive image much nicer. Oh, yeah. It's still nicer. It's just not as big an impact as if you didn't know where the sound came from when you first saw it. Yeah, honestly, I'm also really impressed by the creativity here.

I love how they're finding ways to match the sound to something more pleasant or less pleasant and it works. It really does. What an amazing study. These are all open source by them. where you can download them and play with them and play with them yourselves. But I think what they really do, though, is that they really demonstrate that what your brain is doing with all of

this is that it really cares about what it is the actual kind of physical movement that is causing the annoying sound. It's all about that context. It's all about, yeah, I guess, like your brain potentially, this is the hypothesis still, but like, you know, your brain mirroring what's going on and is watching. Yeah. And if you see the negative one first, you just can't reinterpret the new one without mirroring the old knowledge you have of the sound. I wonder if on audio only, it could still work.

If you just gave an audio description of what the sound was ahead of time, you told people, hey, this is coins being dropped into a jar. And they'd be like, yeah, I don't care. But if you told them that it was a fork tapping a plate, they'd be. Yeah, I wouldn't like it. Irritated. The other thing about this is that it really demonstrates how there is the list of exclusions, right? So people don't get annoyed when they hear the sound of toddlers eating or elderly people or people with dementia or adults with sort of intellectual disabilities.

You know, it's not as annoying. It's like it's something you can empathize with the situation. Yeah. And it's only when they should do better, right? So is that yet another layer, or is it still part of the hyper mirroring issue, that if I see a toddler chewing, my brain goes, that's just so different from your own chewing that we're not going to trigger the neural mirroring? Well, potentially, I mean, the neural mirroring thing is like, is a particular, is one particular

hypothesis. In truth, we don't totally know why this is so key in some people. One of the limitations of this mirroring idea is that it sort of seems to work for the chewing. But some people have misophonia for, I don't know, like a pen clicking or like tapping or just hearing somebody fidget or like, you know, cutlery hitting a plate. And it does really work for that. So I think there's sort of limitations to this particular description. One of the other hypotheses is that they might have this genetic component to it because 23 and me, they put the question. out to 80,000 customers about, you know, does the sound of other people chewing fill you with

rage? And about 20% of people said yes, which is similar to what you got in the other studies. There were some genetic components to this that would pick up like, I mean, we're talking about tiny little correlations here and there that maybe there's like genes that are miswiring certain neurons. I mean, we don't know, right? Ultimately is the big part of this. It does also seem to come into play in particular when you know people really well. So like you mentioned your mum, my sister, her jaw, I think dislocated when she was younger or something. Her jaw clicks as she eats and it drives me insane. It drives me insane. Hannah, that is exactly what annoys me about my own mother's chewing. Her jaw pops and there's just something about how she doesn't do anything to

mitigated. It just, she just keeps doing it against my will. And I'm like, I can't do this. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I think that's it. It's the against the will part. Because it's not, and that's the thing about misophonia is that it's not just discussed. It's that it actually really quickly turns into anger. Like, so in the studies on this, physical aggression is quite rare, right? It's sort of rare that it ends up going into that. Right. Verbal aggression actually could be quite common, But a lot of it stays inside where people are describing internal aggressive thoughts and then maybe followed by shame because everyone of them knows that their reaction is completely disproportionate. Yep. But what's interesting is no one is reporting fear as the first response.

It's anger and then humiliation about the anger. It is. It's anger, which kind of goes counter to the disgust hypothesis that I've been mulling over because when I see disgusting things, I don't get angry. But you know what? I can escape disgusting things in a way that I can't socially, acceptably escape a meal with my own mother. So I don't have a flight response available. There's only fight.

There's only, stop it. Right. But I think it's also that, you know, if this mirroring can is to be believed, then it's something that's happening inside of you that you didn't choose, you know? It's like, the movement in your own head, the jaw, the chewing, whatever, that's like a boundary that's being crossed that you're not happy about. It's not a threat that's approaching, which is why it doesn't come out as fear. It's like, it's like a boundary that's being crossed. And there's someone to blame. And that's kind of the part that decides it. Because anger, unlike disgust, I think disgust, doesn't necessarily have a responsible party, whereas I think anger does. And you sort of have someone sitting right there with a crisp. that you can be angry at. It can attach to a cause.

Attached to a cause. Absolutely. Absolutely. The other thing that's worth saying about this, if the argument so far is right, then that you're kind of mirroring what somebody else is doing and it can feel horrible.

The same sound should also be able to make you feel good. And they do in the form of ASMR because there is a big Venn diagram of people who enjoy ASMR or experience ASM and mesophonia, right? The two, there's like a very big overlap between the two. The difference with ASMR, I think in a lot of ways, you are imagining that experience in yourself too, right?

So if someone sort of does hair brushing or like stroking down the back of your neck or, you know, it's like stroking on screen, you are kind of imagining that sensation also happening to you. It's not just the sound, the sound helps, but it's like you're, it's really, you're physically experiencing it in your own. own body. But the difference is that you're consenting to it. You know, you're actively going to have to

try and to try and experience that. That's right. Yeah, you know, I deliberately pressed play on the video of the woman chewing. And so I would have been more disgusted if I was forced to watch it. And it wasn't for a podcast episode. It still was not pleasant. It was unpleasant. I agree. Look, it's not for me. It's not for me. But it is for some people who have you ever come across mugbang? Yeah, yeah. Oh my God. It's wild to that stuff. Absolutely wild. Yeah. My sister likes to watch people review food and eat food in their cars. And again, she's deciding to watch these. And so yeah, it doesn't trigger this like against my own will. Something's happening in my brain. Mm-hmm. And some people say that actually the sort of their craving for the food can be satiated by watching other people eat it. But you're kind of craving like really just loads and loads of food. The numbers that some of these mug bang videos get, though, oh my lord, I was in South Korea last year and was talking to somebody about this MacBam craze.

And a lot of them were saying that eating, you know, sort of as a communal event was a really big thing in Korea. But now that people are working more, people are living in single person apartments, you know, working really late as well, you don't really get the same opportunity to share meals with people. So MacBang is like a tiny bit of a loneliness thing, but it's also like a just watching someone gorge themselves on huge amounts of food and then physically sharing that experience with them by listening to it ends up satiating a bit of your craving. Wow. Not for me. I think I'd just rather eat the burger.

Yeah, I'm not personally a fan, but I think that does explain a lot of the, or some of the, the draw they have for so many people. But there you go. Should we finish by eating some more crisps, shall we? Let's do it. All of you listening out there, all of you watching, enjoy. Let's end on our own MacBank, shall we? I'm trying to be, like, super gross.

When you're not synced with me, that did bother me. Mmm. I love that. I love that. The salt is on my lips and I can look it off. Mmm. All right, see you guys next time.