評論
打印
Not nice to listen to. But what makes such noises unbearable?
這聽起來很不悅耳。是什么讓這些聲音聽起來如此刺耳？
Part of the answer is that the brain appears to be hardwired to be alarmed at, for example, alarms and other shrill noises.
一部分原因是大腦似乎天生對某些聲音，例如警報聲以及其他刺耳的噪音易于產生警覺。
Researchers scanned the brains of 16 participants as they listened to a range of sounds, and asked them to rate the sounds from unpleasant to less unpleasant. Activity in both the auditory cortex and the amygdala varied directly with the subject's ratings.
研究人員讓16名受試者聆聽各種聲音，并掃描他們的大腦活動，然后讓他們評價聲音的悅耳程度。通過掃描發現杏仁體和聽覺皮層的活動與受試者的評價同步變化。
The auditory cortex is where a sound's acoustic features are processed. But it is the amygdala—the small part of the brain in charge of emotional memory—that encodes those features and triggers the negative reaction to unpleasant sounds. And this reaction from the amygdala is delivered back to the cortex making us extremely sensitive (acoustically) to such sounds. This interaction between the auditory cortex and amygdala happens so fast as to seem instant.
聽覺皮層是腦中處理聲音特征的部分。但負責情緒記憶的是大腦中一個很小的區域——杏仁體，杏仁體能夠解密這些特征，并引起對令人不快的聲音的消極反應。而且杏仁體的反應會重新傳回聽覺皮層，這讓人們對類似的聲音極其敏感。這種聽覺皮層和杏仁體之間的互動發生得如此之快，以至于頃刻之間就消失了。
The researchers hope to test this model next with purely pleasurable sounds, as well as other types of negative sounds, including bad words, like [bleep] and [bleep] and [bleep.]
研究人員期望下次測試這種模式時采用美妙的聲音，或者其它類型的消極聲音，也包括像[bleep]這樣的不好的詞匯。
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