The researchers found that screams produced a response in the brain’s fear center, the amygdala, whereas ordinary speech or music does not.
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Postdoctoral students at the New York University have recently started to wonder why of all noises in the world screams make us so uneasy.
They saw that the screams can actually heigthen the response of the amgydala in the anterior part of the temporal lobe in the cerebrum.
According to Philly.com, Arnal and his team studied an audio makeup of screams and alarm sounds, such as vehicle horns and buzzer.
What sets screams and alarms apart from other sounds is that they have a property called roughness, which refers to how fast a sound changes in loudness.
The scientists then determined how screams are processed in the brain.
The speed and accuracy in identifying the precise location of screams by the volunteers was far greater compared with regular vocalisation.
“There’s a part of the soundscape that’s reserved for screams, which is cool and weird – but it makes sense, because you want that sound to be specialized”, Dr. David Poeppel, a professor of psychology and neural science at NYU and one of the study’s authors, told The Huffington Post.
Dr. Poeppel explained that screams that ranked higher in roughness led people to label them as being scarier. It also serves as the first study to relate roughness itself to associations with both alarm and fear.
When it comes to making one immediately vigilant, there are few sounds more effective than a bloodcurdling human scream. Brain imaging data indicated that rougher human cries activate the brain’s fear circuitry.
Fear factor Does the sound of a human scream make your hair stand on end? “Many animals scream, which suggest that screams may be an ancestor of vocal communication”. She has contributed to Capital Wired many times for the past few years.As a writer, Mariel has a passion for technology and how it interacts with the medical industry.
The new research is unusual because scientists haven’t devoted much attention to screams, even though the sounds have a unique way of focusing the mind.
Looking ahead, the researchers plan to continue investigating human screams in the lab, especially those of infants, to see if their screams are particularly rough.
“Normal wedding speech practices have only thin dissimilarities in intensity, between 7 and six Hertz (thorough uncertainty series per second), but outcries can temper rapidly, various between 30 and 150 Hertz”, defined neuroscientist Luc Arnal from the originial and University of Geneva. The research team discovered that the “roughness” or fast change in loudness, made screams different from all other sound waves.
Hearing a person scream – whether in real life or in a movie – is a universal distress call. The researchers also monitored brain activity in study subjects as they listened to screams and other sounds.
The finding is also evidence that acoustical engineers have been tapping into the property of roughness just by trial and error.
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Using an MRI scanner, researchers analysed the brains of people listening to recorded screams (Janet Leigh is shown screaming in a grab from the 1960 film Psycho).
