When we hear someone scream, whether it be in a horror film or in real life, it triggers a natural response to know there’s danger. But is it just because we’ve been conditioned for that with our experience of communication, or is there more to it?
As it turns out, a new study has demonstrated that there is actually a spot in our brain that responds to the pitch of screams and notifies us of possible danger.
“If you ask a person on the street what’s special about screams, they’ll say that they’re loud or have a higher pitch,” senior author David Poeppel, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, told CNN. “But there’s lots of stuff that’s loud and there’s lots of stuff that’s high-pitched, so you’d want a scream to be genuinely useful in a communicative context.”
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The researchers looked at sound waves of screams and plotted them with auditory neurons. They found that there is a section of the auditory spectrum not used in normal speech, so the perception of screams actually fits neurologically into a small area of human communication.
“We even saw that this observation remained true when we compared screaming to singing and speaking, even across different languages,” said Luc Arnal, the study’s co-author.
Part of the reason screams fit into this niche area is because of their roughness in sound, which doesn’t actually indicate a raspy quality. In psychoacoustics, roughness means dissonance, or the unpleasant qualities of a sound.
“Roughness refers to fast sound changes in loudness (in a 30-150Hz frequency range) of a sound that can be high-pitched or not,” Arnal said, CNN reported. “Everyone is familiar with those lights that flash superfast in clubs. Screams could be considered as strobophones, since they are modulating very fast in an analogous way in the auditory domain.”
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Fear or the feeling of being alarmed is triggered in the amygdala by this roughness, and study subjects responded more to screams than to loud buzzers or alarms.
So how can these findings be useful to us? As the researchers pointed out, adding more roughness to alarms that are designed to alert us of danger would be beneficial.
“The same way a bad smell is added to natural gas to make it easily detectable, adding roughness to alarm sounds may improve and accelerate their processing,” Poeppel said.