AHHHHHHH!! How Blood-Curdling Screams Affect Your Brain

A really good scream is a beautiful thing, evolutionarily speaking.
It can cause wide-reaching results, and when paired with a threat?
Ohhhhh man.
Fear can set off what’s called a defense cascade -- a set of behaviors that cause you
to... run or defend yourself… - freeze because you’re so scared… - or keep you from shouting
or moving at all! - sometimes it can cause you to fall over - or even faint to protect
yourself!
Seriously, fear is really powerful.
The source of this emotional response is buried deep in your brain; in a set of neurons called
the amygdala.
The fear can be emotional like abandonment, or from physical danger like an attack.
But it can also be triggered by the sound of screams.
And, new research has found just what about a scream triggers your amygdala the best (or
worst)?
Screams, according to the paper, are a “unique signal” and exploit distinct features not
used by regular speech!
When you hear voices, your brain processes them -- “Do I know that man or woman?”
“How old are they?”
“Are they emotional?”
Screams?
Nuh-uh.
They go right from ear to amygdala.
BAM.
For the first time, the study characterized the scariness of screams, by their roughness.
<pause>
Roughness, is a measure of modulation.
Think of alarm sounds, rougher ones are scarier, like klaxons or alarm sounds.
If someone screams, you can hear that modulation -- that’s like a vocal strobe light!
You can’t ignore it!
The “acoustic roughness,” they found, “selectively activates the amygdala” triggering
fear and danger processing.
Fear feels different from other emotions.
And this is (partly) why.
Without it, we wouldn’t’ve made it this far in our evolution.
Our brain processes screams differently from other auditory communications.
As animals, we share this fear response with other creatures, but as humans?
We can sometimes get stuck in this cascade.
Re-playing the fear again and again in our minds…
By learning about how fear works we can help people suffering trauma overcome it with therapy.
It’s amazing that all this comes back to two little bits of neuron deep in our ancient
brains.
Happy Halloween everyone!
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Hey you!
Take a sec and subscribe.
Don’t be afraid.
Clowns!
Are you scared yet?
Why would they even be scary?
Natalia has the science, here.
Final fun fact: these fear emotions were first analyzed by Darwin in 1872.
He recognized we have emotions to adapt to our world, just like lower animals do!
Love that guy.
Thanks for watching!

AHHHHHHH!! How Blood-Curdling Screams Affect Your Brain

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