HEALTH
Squeak! Screech! Those creepy things that make us cringe
Published: November 17, 2009, 12:30 am
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The flu hit Jennifer L. Smith hard. The Allentown woman suffered from symptoms for two weeks, including fever, chills and coughing.
But in some ways, being confronted by the cotton wadded under the cap of a new bottle of Tylenol was the worst part.
The allthingsjennifer.com blogger vented on her Facebook page: “Am I the only one out there who HATESHATESHATES cotton balls and the feel of them? I opened a new big bottle of Tylenol and there it was staring at me. AAAAH! Would I rather have a fever, or feel that cotton scratch along the side of the bottle? Tough choice.”
Within a minute, her friends began to agree.
Sherry L. Byrnes of Buffalo wrote, “I use tweezers to get it out!”
Sine Lorenzen of Tonawanda wrote, “Thought I was the only one who felt that way! I would rather hear fingernails on a chalkboard than the ‘sound’ of a cotton ball!”
It’s that comparison — fingernails scraped across a chalkboard — that most people understand best. That chalkboard-fingernails sound so universally causes people to cringe that it has been studied scientifically.
In their study, “Psychoacoustics of a chilling sound,” D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand of Northwestern University played recordings of different annoying sounds to subjects to test their reactions. To evoke the “nails on a chalkboard” sound, they slowly scraped a three-pronged garden tool over a slate surface.
Doesn’t just reading that make your mouth pucker and your teeth hurt?
In addition to other scraping sounds, their subjects listened to someone “rubbing two pieces of Styrofoam together.”
That would have been too much for Joan Fildes, an attorney from Getzville. “I am terribly troubled by the sound of Styrofoam packaging being removed from boxes. ... Makes me cringe every time!” she says. Fildes finds the foam sound “most prevalent around the holidays,” especially during family gift exchanges. “I have actually had others open gifts for me,” she says. “Then I plug my ears like a child so I don’t have to hear it. The sound literally gives me goose bumps!”
Pouring sounds
Emma Morrill of Batavia hates the squeaking of Styrofoam packaging, but also reacts to “the ‘glug, glug, glug’ sound when somebody pours something quickly out of a bottle.”
She says, “There’s something just sooo vulgar and icky about the sound. The worst is when someone is pouring wine into a glass. That ‘pluch-pluch-pluch’ sound makes me shudder, even though I love wine. I try to pour everything very slowly, so as to avoid making that sound.”
John Carocci of Buffalo is repulsed by the texture of slightly rough unglazed bisque china. But he’s lucky, he says, “because I don’t have any and it’s pretty uncommon to see it in a restaurant.”
Some people cringe when confronted by ice cream served in a metal bowl with a metal spoon.
David Raub of Swormville has bad memories of the tiny wooden spoons that were handed out with cups of ice cream back in grade school. Other wooden utensils, ranging from chopsticks to toothpicks, don’t bother him, but thoughts of licking a wooden spoon still sends a shiver up his spine.
Kirk Lauberstein of the West Side hates the sound of metal shovels striking small stones, a sound he heard a lot lately when he helped plant trees along Grant Street. He used a pointed shovel to dig holes, and cringed when the edge scraped a rock, he said. “The noise is bad when I do it myself but seems worse when someone else does,” he said.
Lianna Kong of Los Angeles, author of the book “I am Neurotic (And So Are You)” and creator of the Web site www.iamneurotic.com, has heard from plenty of people who have these uncontrollable negative reactions to sounds, textures or experiences. She lists them on her Web site under “aversions.”
“Our senses are hypersensitive to certain things,” she says. “For me, it’s the idea of a person chewing food with their mouth open, and it’s not the etiquette issue, it’s the tooth contact and the food textures.” She makes a small shivery sound of disgust.
How about people chewing gum? “I don’t mind that,” Kong says. “It’s different somehow.”
Smith’s cotton ball aversion developed when she was a teenager, because she recalls using them when she was younger. But by the time she was in college, she says, she dreaded them, and her friends knew it. They once “loaded up my bed with a bag of cotton balls under the comforter to freak me out, and it worked!” she says.
No sympathy
Letting close friends or family members know that something makes you cringe can be dangerous, because it generally prompts teasing rather than understanding.
For Amy Maxwell of Buffalo, it’s the sound of people scraping their teeth on silverware, particularly on forks. “My brother will literally do it until I get up from the table or I poke him with my fork,” she says.
Maxwell says the sound “literally makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my entire head and neck stiffen up. I usually have to shake it off, kind of like a dog shakes when wet.”
Laurie Wolfe of Amherst also has a physical reaction. If she hear someone brushing their teeth or running their fingers across brush bristles, she says, “I start making involuntary screeching noises and block my ears.” Of course, when her older sister found this out, Wolfe says, she used to “run after me with a brush to drive me crazy. ”
Wolfe has a theory about the roots of her strong and uncontrollable reaction. “I wonder if the sound waves are similar to those created by an ancient predator — say a flying reptile — and I’m running for cover instinctually.”
The scientists who studied the chill-inducing sounds had a similar theory. Because the reaction to nails on a chalkboard draws an “automatic, almost visceral reaction,” they wondered if it “mimics some naturally occurring, innately aversive event,” such as the “vocalizations of some predator.” One screeching sound was found to be similar to the warning cry of macaque monkeys.
But no matter why the reaction developed, they wrote, “the human brain obviously still registers a strong vestigial response to this chilling sound.”
That would be the sound of silverware scraping on plates, right? For Sherry Byrnes’ 14-year-old niece, that’s what does it. The sound “actually causes her to leave the table to try to get her skin to lay back down,” and makes her feel queasy, says Byrnes. “It’s actually pretty funny to see happen, not that she would agree.”
aneville@buffnews.com
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