How a Human Scream Uniquely Activates the Fear Response in Your Brain
Do you notice how startled or affected you are when you hear a human scream? Hearing a person scream elicits a lot of emotions from a person. These emotions can vary from worry to fear.
Fear is said to be a normal response upon hearing a human scream. According to a study, human screams have a certain roughness to their quality. This specific sound quality also has a specific response from the brain which is fear.
So the next time you hear someone screaming and you responded with more than just a startle, that’s pretty normal. This then will prod you to investigate or call for help.
Fascinatingly, the researchers found that the amygdala, and not the auditory cortex, is sensitive to temporal modulations in the roughness range.
Their results suggest that rough sounds specifically target neural circuits involved in fear/danger processing. This is the first direct evidence in support of the idea that roughness is an acoustic attribute that triggers adapted reactions to danger. The researchers speculate that this behavioral feature confers an evolutionary advantage, and that rough vocalization, which recruit dedicated neural processes “that prioritize fast reaction to danger over detailed contextual evaluation”—in other words, that a rough sound can trigger your fear response more directly, and therefore faster, than something you, say, witness with your eyes and process in your mind.
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