By Emma Young
No one likes the sound of someone else chewing or drinking. But for some people, it’s enough to cause overwhelming feelings of anger or disgust — and in some cases, send them into a violent rage. People with “misophonia” (literally a hatred of sounds) over-react to some common everyday “trigger sounds” — typically, sounds made by another person. Though the phenomenon has been well documented, exactly what causes it hasn’t been clear. Now a new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience provides a compelling explanation: that misophonia isn’t related to hearing so much as to an “over-mirroring” of someone else’s physical actions. The team, led by Sukhbinder Kumar at Newcastle University, thinks that this excessive mirroring causes anger in some sufferers, and anxiety and distress in others.
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