People who can’t stand mouth or breath noises have special brains. Explanations.
- Teeth chattering, saliva or chewing gum noises… These sounds, insignificant for most French people, are a torment for 15% of them.
- Long ignored, this affliction has a name: misophonia, which literally means “hatred of sound”.
Does a person who eats while making noise bother you? Know that you have misophonia, and researchers think they’ve figured out why.
“A devastating disorder”
Misophonia is a common disorder characterized by the appearance of strong negative emotions, such as anger and anxiety, in response to certain everyday sounds, such as those generated by people eating, drinking, or breathing. “The mundane nature of these trigger sounds makes misophonia a devastating disorder for sufferers and their families,” write the scientists in the preamble.
After testing 27 people, they established that the connection between the part of the brain that processes sounds and the part of the premotor cortex, which organizes the movements of the muscles of the mouth and throat, would be stronger in individuals suffering from misophonia.
Special cortices
The researchers, published in The Journal of Neurosciencethus demonstrated that, compared to controls, people suffering from misophonia do not show any difference in the responses of the auditory cortex to trigger sounds, but that they do show:
– a stronger connectivity by rMRI between the auditory and visual cortices and the ventral pre-motor cortex responsible for orofacial movements;
– greater functional connectivity between the auditory cortex and the orofacial motor area during the perception of sounds in general;
– greater activation of the orofacial motor area, specifically in response to trigger sounds.
Towards new treatments
“Misophony has long been considered a sound emotion processing disorder, in which ‘simple’ food and chewing sounds produced by others elicit negative emotional responses,” write the authors of the research. They continue: “Our data provide an alternative but complementary perspective of misophonia, which emphasizes the action of the triggering person rather than the sounds.”
And to conclude: “This shift in perspective has important implications for the design of therapies and treatments for misophonia. It suggests that instead of focusing on sounds, as many existing therapies do, effective treatments should target brain representation movement”.
.
