Abnormal Connection in the Brain Could Trigger Overreaction for Certain Sounds

Abnormal Connection in the Brain Could Trigger Overreaction for Certain Sounds
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Without taking grammar nazis into account, surely there are a lot of people out there who react in an aggressive way at the simple hearing of certain sounds. If you’re among them, you might be dealing with an abnormal connection occurring in your brain, according to a new study that ScienceAlert.com speaks about.

Misophonia is what causes a person to get irritated by certain sounds, and scientists have discovered what’s causing it. The brain connection responsible for it can be found in the auditory cortex and through the orofacial motor cortex.

A ‘super-sensitized connection’

The research team had to analyze fMRI scans of dozens of people who had to deal with misophonia. In this way, they discovered a “super-sensitized connection.”

Sukhbinder Kumar, a neuroscientist from Newcastle University, explained:

Our findings indicate that for people with misophonia there is abnormal communication between the auditory and motor brain regions,

You could describe it as a ‘super-sensitized connection’. This is the first time such a connection in the brain has been identified for the condition.

But as it usually happens during scientific studies, researchers also ran into some surprises. Kumar also explained, as cited by the same source:

What surprised us was that we also found a similar pattern of communication between the visual and motor regions, which reflects that misophonia can also occur when triggered by something visual,

This leads us to believe that this communication activates something called the ‘mirror system’, which helps us process movements made by other individuals by activating our own brain in a similar way – as if we were making that movement ourselves.

The new study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

What do you think? Do you also experience some kind of irritation when hearing certain sounds? Feel free to tell us in the comment section!


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Even since he was a child, Cristian was staring curiously at the stars, wondering about the Universe and our place in it. Today he's seeing his dream come true by writing about the latest news in astronomy. Cristian is also glad to be covering health and other science topics, having significant experience in writing about such fields.

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