外刊阅读20250220｜受不了“吧唧嘴”的声音？“病因”找到了

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That human responses to sound can be shaped by our perception of its source is not a new idea. Over a decade ago, for instance, researchers reported that healthy study participants exposed to recordings of unpleasant sounds, such as nails on a chalkboard , found them less aversive —and showed lower skin conductance response, a proxy for arousal —when they were told they were listening to a piece of music.

For those with misophonia , sounds tend to be most troubling when they are generated by other humans. The authors of one preprint Berger and his colleagues reviewed found that participants with misophonia rated human eating sounds more aversive than animal ones. Other studies they analyzed suggest that the strength of a sufferer’s emotional reaction varies based on their relationship to the person making the sound.

Neuroimaging studies suggest an explanation for the condition may lie in certain areas of the brain responsible for both perception of sounds and understanding social relationships. One study from 2019 found that the parts of the auditory cortex activated by trigger sounds in people with misophonia are ones involved in the perception of motion, language, faces, and the mind states of others: the posterior superior temporal gyrus and sulcus .

Other imaging studies have shown that trigger sounds tend to activate the motor cortex in people with misophonia, says Berger, and that the brains of people who have the condition feature stronger connections between the auditory and motor cortices compared with control subjects. This supports Berger’s hypothesis : The motor cortex is responsible for our perception of physical movement, both our own and that of others, and plays an important role in our ability to understand behaviors and intentions of the people around us.

Berger proposes that people with misophonia may have heightened unconscious awareness of the movements of others, that these movements may be overrepresented in the brain relative to their own movements. Such a mismatch could make them feel an uncanny lack of control over their own bodies, he suggests, which could cause emotional anguish . It would help explain a surprising tendency among people with misophonia: They often unconsciously mimic the actions underlying the troubling sound, chewing, or sniffing in unison with the other person. The mimicry could potentially provide some relief by helping them reassert control over their brains’ representations of these movements, Berger says.