THE MYSTERY OF MISOPHONIA Alexia Yiannouli discusses the condition of misophonia and contrasts this with ASMR.
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isophonia has been a mystery to medicine for some time. Taken from the ancient Greek meaning ‘hatred of sound’, what was once thought of as simply a pet peeve has now been correctly identified as a medical disorder. Sufferers of the condition are left feeling emotions of anxiety, fear, and even disproportionate anger as a result of being exposed to certain types of noises. But the name of the condition is not quite accurate. People with misophonia don’t have an intense hatred of all noise, only some forms of it. And their response to those types of noise can’t really be defined as hatred, but as extreme and involuntary reactions to specific auditory stimuli.
Misophonia can be considered as a type of synaesthesia; a condition when particular sensory stimuli can evoke additional sensations as a result of increased neural connections. The condition was only given
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Delving deeper into the physiology behind the disease, sound vibrations are transmitted via electrical energy into the inner ear, before travelling via the eighth cranial nerve to the brain. The unconscious mind then works to unscramble the sounds collected by the ear in order to make sense of what they mean. This process, known as auditory gating, allows your brain to differentiate between stimuli and identify those that are potentially harmful. In the case of misophonia, the auditory gating [RA2] doesn’t quite work in the way that it should, evoking an exaggerated response to a non-threatening stimulus and triggering the fight or flight system, sending it into overdrive.
Ferocious tapping on a keyboard in a quiet room. Heavy breathing. Mechanical mastication of food by overworked molars. The impatient clicking of a pen.
Ferocious tapping on a keyboard in a quiet room. Heavy breathing. Mechanical mastication of food by overworked molars. The impatient clicking of a pen. It is estimated that one in six people have misophonia, with everyday noises that might have otherwise gone unnoticed result in a heightened emotional response which sufferers struggle to control.
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a name in 2000 and has the potential to drive wedges in relationships and have a considerable impact on people’s day-to-day lives. It is often still not considered a proper
[RA1] condition, resulting in the stigma of it being considered only a pet peeve. The physiology behind the mystery Since acknowledgement of the condition started to surface in the 1990s, scientists have been trying to work out exactly what causes the condition. In 2017, researchers discovered that, when those suffering from misophonia experienced a sound that would trigger them, they would have a sudden and increased activation of their anterior insular cortex, the area of the brain comprising the salience network responsible for processing emotions. Studies also discovered overactive involvement of the hippocampus and amygdala, which led to it finally being recognised as a condition that caused physiological changes to brain activity.
A proposed explanation for what happens is that after a trigger is detected, and a stimulus is perceived as harmful - whether it is actually dangerous or not - it elicits a physical response which then leads to an extreme emotional response. Attempts to explain the process are still somewhat hypothetical, with a lot about the misophonic response chain still not known. This leads to consideration of an important question why are we so quick to label something as having psychological or emotional origins just because we don’t know exactly what causes it?
