The Complexities of Sound

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    Sound and hearing are interesting to me because I feel like I have a love/hate relationship with them. Some sounds, like my favorite music genres and nature sounds, I love and enjoy listening to. Other times, and with other sounds, I really dislike hearing them and/or feel overwhelmed by them. For me, sound is the sense that I most associate with the extremes of feeling incredibly understood/calmed by music and feeling uncomfortable/overwhelmed by sounds that are unpleasant (at least to me). I physically cringe when I think about nails scratching a chalkboard or the sensation of cotton squeaking between my fingers. Yet, I’ve always loved music. I played the cello all throughout school, loved performing in musicals, and still sing along to my favorite songs on car rides by myself. After reading Ackerman’s chapter on hearing, I still wonder: why are some sounds so joyous and others so detestable?

    A particularly intense case of certain sounds causing anxiety, discomfort, and anger is known as misophonia. Although not as much now, this is something that I have definitely experienced, mostly with the common trigger of mouth noises. According to an article from The New York Times, “neuroscientists say that brain scans of misophonia sufferers show that particular sounds, like eating and drinking, cause the part of their brain that processes emotions, the anterior insular cortex, to go into overdrive.” Essentially, there is a connection between the emotion-processing parts of the brain and the auditory-processing ones. This made complete sense to me. Researchers also noted that misophonia is probably connected to recalling past experiences, which partly explains why misophonia can be so recurrent. Reading about all of this was really fascinating to me. There are all of these complex connections between the different parts of the brain, which leads to links between seemingly unrelated processes. Synesthesia is another interesting phenomenon where a stimulation of one sense leads to other involuntary sense experiences. I first learned about synesthesia in a book called A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass, where the main character, a 13-year-old named Mia, learns that she has synesthesia.

Front cover of Wendy Mass's book A Mango-Shaped Space. The title is in multi-colored letters and the image below is of an orange outline of a cat sitting on a bed in front of a window.
By PointsofNoReturn via Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mango_Shaped_Space#/media/File:1st_edition_copy_of_A_Mango_Shaped_Space_by_Wendy_Mass.jpg 

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