Find Out Why The Sound Of People Chewing Loudly Annoys You!

Are you one of those people that gets irritated with loud chewers and soup slurpers? Do get annoyed by the sound of someone crunching an apple or sucking loudly on a lollipop? Well guess what? There’s a name for the condition! You suffer from MISOPHONIA, which comes from the Greek words Miso-hate and Phonia- sound.

Misophonia, which was first named in 2001, is an actual brain abnormality in which sufferers hate sounds such as eating, chewing, loud breathing or even repeated toe tapping.

For a long time it was thought people were just being precious and fussy when they complained about loud eaters, but new research from a team at the U.K.’s Newcastle University has proven that those with misophonia have a difference in their brain’s frontal lobe to non-sufferers.

A recent report in Current Biology, says scans of misophobia sufferers found changes in brain activity when a ‘trigger’ sound was heard. Brain imaging revealed that people with the condition have an abnormality in their emotional control mechanism which causes their brains to go into overdrive on hearing trigger sounds. The researchers also found that trigger sounds could evoke a heightened physiological response, with increased heart rate and sweating.

As part of the study, an MRI was used to measure the brain activity of people with and without misophonia while they were listening to a range of sounds. The sounds were categorized into neutral sounds (rain, a busy café, water boiling), unpleasant sounds (a baby crying, a person screaming) and trigger sounds (the sounds of breathing or eating). When presented with trigger sounds, those with misophonia presented different results to those without the condition.

“I hope this will reassure sufferers,” Tim Griffiths, Professor of Cognitive Neurology at Newcastle University and UCL, said. “I was part of the skeptical community myself until we saw patients in the clinic and understood how strikingly similar the features are.”