Why Loud Chewing Makes You Angry

12:01Hannah Fry:And you're making exactly the right point about the alarm here because this is where sirens, car alarms, smoke detectors, 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, you know, 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. There's one in particular, it's called the long range acoustic device.

12:42Hannah Fry: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 2100 and 3100 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 favourite 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.

13:25Hannah Fry:Pirates were sort of trying to climb on board 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 were like, do you know what, actually, I'm all right, Franks, don't want to. Don't think I will. Don't want to come on board.

13:45Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah. Which is really, I think. So 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? You got, well, I got a 40 hertz. No, that's too pleasant. I've got the Spice Girls wannabe. Nah, it's still too good. Oh, I've got a 3000 hertz sine wave. Yeah, that'll get them.

14:10Hannah Fry:Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I mean, I mean, talking about Spice Girls, it 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 distressing. And incredibly quickly can be distressing incredibly quickly. One other example, there's something called the mosquito. Have you come across this?

14:37Michael Stevens:Yes, I have. Yeah. Go on, you tell it. You say it. Okay, so I was in Jacksonville, Florida doing a Brain Candy 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 can hear it. To keep the juvenile delinquents from – 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, like just like I do now. But my ears could hear this sound. And it kept away like teenagers, basically.

15:20Michael Stevens: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.

15:34Hannah Fry:So this is set at 17.4 kilohertz. It's really loud as well, 108 decibels. It's just like, oh, really too much. I have, I've 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 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 teenagers' 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.

16:12Hannah Fry:That's just like a general rule.

16:14Michael Stevens:The idea that you cannot physically exist in this public space and we're going to make it really, really bad for you.

16:22Hannah Fry:The idea that every young person is a delinquent also just 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.

16:36Michael Stevens:Oh, that's clever.

16:37Hannah Fry:That's really smart.

16:39Michael Stevens:They could be talking to each other in class through Morse code beeps of mosquito sounds. Just at 17 kilohertz that no one else can hear. Yeah. 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 try, but you're not going to hear it. Oh, yeah, I can. It goes all the way up to 20 ,000. So at 17 ,000 hertz. No, I mean, can you 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't play that sound, but it's probably that I'm too old.

17:13Michael Stevens:I'll have to show this to my daughter.

17:14Hannah Fry:What level can you hear at?

17:15Michael Stevens:Okay, let me bring it down while it's playing. Oh, okay. I can hear it at 14 ,381. Oh, 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 about 14 for me. 1426, I can just hear something. Okay. So it could be that that's the threshold for our computer speakers. We needed 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.

17:53Hannah Fry: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 24 months.

18:03Michael Stevens:Special ears. Yeah.

18:05Hannah Fry: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. What is this roughness you're talking about?

18:40Hannah Fry:One of the big things about the reason why chalkboards sound so horrific is because what your nails are doing is they're sort of leaving and then rejoining the surface of the chalkboard. They're jittering all the way down. And so what that means is that you're getting 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, I mean, it's about as menacing as a cardigan in comparison to the other things that we've been describing. There have 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.

19:26Hannah Fry: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 count as symptoms. So that's one in five people. 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.

20:15Michael Stevens:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 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.

20:38Hannah Fry:So I should say, actually, I'm going to focus on the hatred of listening to chewing. But 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.

21:03Michael Stevens:I'll tell you, and she might not listen to this episode, but the sound of my mother chewing is really intolerable to me. Interesting, particularly 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.

21:46Michael Stevens:And no one's ever been like,

21:47Hannah Fry:I do remember that time when 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.

21:56Michael Stevens:Now that didn't happen. I think it's unreasonable. I don't, I think I chew like a normal person, but I think that -

22:06Hannah Fry:I've been sitting in the room with Michael many times and he's completely normal. He's completely normal to her.

22:10Michael Stevens:I can't help that I feel – like I myself am being embarrassingly disgusting no matter what. So 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.

22:29Hannah Fry: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.

22:50Michael Stevens: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 there's like, 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 like dry the top of my mouth off.

23:13Hannah Fry:Oh my gosh, you fool.

23:14Michael Stevens:I'll listen to the footage back and I'll just be disgusted. And I'm like, I can't put this video out.

23:18Hannah Fry: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 our job. It's a weird experience.

23:34Michael Stevens:Yeah. It does make you very aware of, or at least more aware of how you appear to other people probably. 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.

24:00Hannah Fry:Yes. I won't even tell you the things that I hyper-focus on on my face because then speaking them out loud will make them true. But yes, I agree is the point. Yes, I agree.

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25:11Michael Stevens:I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned.

25:30Hannah Fry:We have each other. FX is the Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+.

25:43Hannah Fry:Okay, so I think disgust does come into it, but people who really, really have misophonia, there have been investigations into what it is about them that makes them really, really 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 misphrenia and they check 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.

26:23Hannah Fry: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, you don't need me to tell you how contagious yawning can be, right? You watch somebody yawn, your jaw kind of mirrors what they're doing, and then before you know it, you're actually yawning.

26:52Michael Stevens:Even talking about yawning is making me feel this reflex. Like you're sort of sympathetic. 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.

27:13Hannah Fry: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.

27:50Hannah Fry:It was sort of reacted as it would to any other sound. but the difference was in the ventral premotor 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 your lips your jaw and your throat so it's essentially like your 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

28:32Michael Stevens: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 that they

28:45Hannah Fry:call it hyper mirroring. This is the paper called hyper mirroring. But what this means is that it's like, it's almost as 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 it doesn't really want to do.

29:03Michael Stevens:Right. Oh. So that, see, 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 mirroring a thing that I haven't decided to do, how is that different than me feeling like oh that mold is going to get on me and in me yeah

29:39Hannah Fry: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 um this same paper when they were talking to all these people had misophonia they they discovered that nearly half of them actually to try and get around it, they sort of mimic what they're watching. So, 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 evaded.

30:23Hannah Fry:Right. I'm going to try that next time. Well, let's try it now. Let's try it now. Okay. Try it now. So get your crisp. You did not like hearing my crisp. I did not like hearing your crisp.

30:33Michael Stevens: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. So let's do that.

30:48Hannah Fry:So we'll try and match it together. By the way, if you're watching this, which is not just you and me alone here, Michael. There's quite a lot of people watching. If you want to do this with us and see if the misophonia goes away, then do. Grab yourselves some Chris. Super quick. Okay, ready?

31:04Michael Stevens:Hannah's going to lead, so I'm following her lead.

31:06Hannah Fry:Okay, ready?

31:17Michael Stevens: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 gonna turn the volume up let's do it again go on let me join you out i'll try and make it

31:35Hannah Fry:really really like lip smacking this time okay ready okay

31:44it's fine it's kind of it's kind of cool it's like it's um very corporal like i'm very aware

31:51Michael Stevens:of bodies at this moment because I'm just focusing on yours so much and I've got all this stuff in my mouth. But it's not annoying. It's not gross.

32:00Hannah Fry:No, it's not annoying. No, not gross. 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 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 can't smell the inside of your nose, you can't taste the inside of your mouth.

32:39Hannah Fry: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.

32:52Michael Stevens: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.

33:18Hannah Fry: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 I'll start chewing again. 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.

33:55Michael Stevens:Okay, I'm going to hit play.

34:00Michael Stevens: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.

34:19Hannah Fry:Were you horrified by the sound? Were you horrified by anything?

34:22Michael Stevens:But it was fine.

34:22Hannah Fry:No, not at all. I mean, it was a bit weird, but it's okay. Okay. Now watch this video.

34:27Michael Stevens:Oh.

34:30Michael Stevens: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. Okay, I don't want to say it's grosser, but it's suddenly so much more annoying.

34:48Hannah Fry: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, like 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 brook? 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 blackboards, that kind of thing.

35:34Hannah Fry: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. Do you want to see another one? There's loads.

35:47Michael Stevens: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.

36:12Hannah Fry: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.

36:19Michael Stevens: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.

36:44Hannah Fry:It's someone cleaning a screen in a really annoying way.

36:48Michael Stevens: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, oh, I recoil. Horrified, horrified. But when it was a little puppy's bark, I was like, oh my gosh, that little dude.

37:06Hannah Fry: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. You have to show the positive video first. So let me demonstrate this for you. Okay. So here is another one.

37:34Michael Stevens:Okay, so...

37:35Hannah Fry: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.

37:42Michael Stevens: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.

37:54Michael Stevens:Oh, 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, wringing 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, I can tell it's the wrong sound because it's too goopy and mushy for drops of water.

38:43Michael Stevens:Do you want to try one more?

38:44Hannah Fry: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, 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 comes from something like that. Yeah, so do another one,

39:01Michael Stevens:and this time I won't talk over it the first time I 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.

39:21Michael Stevens: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 tines tap the plate, what I'm seeing is a coin falling on top of some other coins. Honestly, I mean, I got to say, Hannah, I still find the positive image much nicer. Oh, yeah.

39:43Hannah Fry:It's still nicer. 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.

39:51Michael Stevens: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 how it works. It really does.

40:02Hannah Fry:What an amazing study. These are all open source, by the way. You can download 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 your brain mirroring what's going on and is watching.

40:38Michael Stevens: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 irritated. Yeah, I wouldn't like it.

41:07Hannah Fry:The other thing about this is that it really demonstrates how there is a 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.

41:37Michael Stevens: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?

41:52Hannah Fry: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 23andMe, they put the question out to 80 ,000 customers about, you know, does the sound of other people chewing fill you with rage?

42:38Hannah Fry: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, 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 mom, 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.

43:18Michael Stevens: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 mitigate it. She just keeps doing it against my will. And I'm like, I can't do this.

43:34Hannah Fry: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 disgust. 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 can be quite common, but a lot of it stays inside where people are describing internal aggressive thoughts and then maybe followed by shame because every one of them knows that their reaction is completely disproportionate. Yep. Yep.

44:08Hannah Fry:But what's interesting is no one is reporting fear as the first response. It's anger and then humiliation about the anger.

44:14Michael Stevens: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. It's true.

44:45Hannah Fry:But I think it's also that, you know, if this mirroring account 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. It'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 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.

45:21Hannah Fry:And you sort of have someone sitting right there with a crisp that you can be angry at.

45:25Michael Stevens:It can attach to a cause.

45:29Hannah Fry:Attach 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, experience ASMR and misophonia, 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, on screen, you are kind of imagining that sensation also happening to you.

46:18Hannah Fry: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 body. But the difference is that you're consenting to it. You know, you're actively going to try and, to try and experience that.

46:32Michael Stevens:That's right. Yeah. You know, I, I, 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.

46:47Hannah Fry:It wasn't pleasant. I agree. Look, it's not for me. It's not for me. But it is for some people. Have you ever come across mukbang?

46:52Michael Stevens:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God.

46:54Hannah Fry:It's wild, that stuff. Absolutely wild.

46:57Michael Stevens:Yeah. My sister likes to watch people review food and eat food in their cars. And again, And 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.

47:13Hannah Fry:And some people say that actually the sort of their craving for the food can be satiated by watching other people eat it. That you're craving, like, really just loads and loads of food. The numbers that some of these mukbang videos get, though, oh, my Lord. I was in South Korea last year and was talking to somebody about this mukbang 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.

47:52Hannah Fry:So McBang is like a tiny bit of a loneliness thing, but it's also like 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. Not for me. I think I'd just rather eat the burger.

48:11Michael Stevens:Yeah, I'm not personally a fan, but I think that does explain a lot of the or some of the draw they have for so many people.

48:20Hannah Fry:But there you go. Should we finish by eating some more crisps, shall we?

48:25Michael Stevens:Let's do it. All right. All of you listening out there, all of you watching, enjoy.

48:28Hannah Fry:Let's end on our own mukbang, shall we?

48:31Michael Stevens:I'm trying to be like super gross.

48:36Hannah Fry:When you're not synced with me, that did bother me.

48:43Michael Stevens:I love that the salt is on my lips. I can lick it off.

48:53Michael Stevens:All right, see you guys next time.

49:04Michael Stevens:I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. No. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned.

49:23Hannah Fry:We have each other.

49:26Michael Stevens:FX's The Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. Most AI coverage leaves you with one of two impressions. Everything is about to change or everything is about to end.

50:05Michael Stevens:I'm NLW and on my show, the AI Daily Brief, I offer something more useful. Clear daily analysis of the stories that actually matter. Is the new model really better or just better on benchmarks? Should your team build agents or buy them? What does the latest lab drama mean for the tools you use every day. Plus, hands-on deep dives that give you AI skills you can use right now. Check out the AI Daily Brief and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify.