[brockf]

How is this an "explanation" or "cracking" the problem? They showed that an emotional response was correlated with neural behavior... what else could it have been?

More broadly, it's frustrating that neuroscientists reframe genuinely interesting questions ("Why do I get angry when people eat apples beside me?") into boring questions ("What does my brain look like when I'm angry about someone eating an apple?").

[sampo]

> How is this an "explanation" or "cracking" the problem? They showed that an emotional response was correlated with neural behavior... what else could it have been?

There are Facebook support groups, and a subreddit, for people suffering form this disorder, and it's not uncommon that family members, spouses and friends think they are just being obnoxious, and advise them to "just shrug it off".

If it's a measurable neurophysiological condition, this gives some support that those people just cannot shrug it off, whatever they try. It can also help the sufferers to know that they are not being just crazy, but something really is different in the way their brain is wired.

[brockf]

To your first point, I'm not sure how this helps the sufferers. What they have shown is that there is a different neural signature correlating with a different emotional response. There's no causal link here, meaning that I might still tell someone to just shrug it off. Maybe they can control their neural activity, just like I can control my neural activity related to thinking about elephants by not thinking about elephants.

To your second point, I would offer two responses. First, while being able to measure something is a win in itself, we need to be clear about what they're measuring. They have shown that suffering ailment X increases the probability that they find neural signature X. They do not know the reverse, meaning this isn't going to unlock early diagnostics or anything. It is unclear how discriminating this response is. Second, it's not clear that this is the product/effect of the way their "brain is wired". Perhaps changes in neural activity caused the observations of different neural connectivity. Perhaps some other factor of their experience or biology caused this sensitivity and the visible differences in connectivity, neural activity, etc. We just don't know.

(P.S. Listening to people eat drives me insane. I'm not going to self-diagnose, but I just want to be clear that I'm not criticizing the finding/report because of a lack of empathy for the sufferers.)

(P.P.S. I'm a recovering cognitive scientist who had to hear about a lot of neuropsych findings that all boiled down to, "This part of the brain lights up when we hear/see/do this! Give me another $5mm grant!").

[jacobzweig]

I'm going to debunk you because as your business partner, I get to constantly annoy you with you loud eating, and this way you have an excuse for being mad.

It's not just the fact that they see a response in AIC that highlights the important aspect of this research, but rather the dissociation between sound evoked activity in controls vs misophonics. While control subjects found unpleasant sounds as annoying as the misophonics found trigger sounds, activity in AIC increased only in the misophonics, and only for the trigger sounds. Interesting to see also that for misophonics, AIC activation scales linearly with the degree of distress - I'm assuming this wasn't the case for unpleasant sounds (but I'm not positive and didn't read closely enough to tell).

You say it's not clear that it's a product of the way their brains are wired, but in the paper they highlight a potential for greater myelination in vmPFC in misophonics. They do this indirectly citing differences in magnetization transfer saturation. I don't know this technique, so I can't really comment on how legit it is, but it seems at least there's some effort to attribute this to structural rather than purely functional differences.

And yeah, of course it's always possible that it's some other factor that is underlying these effects, but I think this dissociation shows reasonably convincing evidence for pursuing more research on this condition (e.g., diffusion imaging to better understand potential structural differences)

[wallace_f]

>To your first point, I'm not sure how this helps the sufferers. What they have shown is that there is a different neural signature correlating with a different emotional response. There's no causal link here, meaning that I might still tell someone to just shrug it off. Maybe they can control their neural activity, just like I can control my neural activity related to thinking about elephants by not thinking about elephants.

>To your second point, I would offer two responses. First, while being able to measure something is a win in itself, we need to be clear about what they're measuring. They have shown that suffering ailment X increases the probability that they find neural signature X. They do not know the reverse, meaning this isn't going to unlock early diagnostics or anything. It is unclear how discriminating this response is. Second, it's not clear that this is the product/effect of the way their "brain is wired". Perhaps changes in neural activity caused the observations of different neural connectivity. Perhaps some other factor of their experience or biology caused this sensitivity and the visible differences in connectivity, neural activity, etc. We just don't know.

That's a very good point, to expand, it appears the implicit conclusion at the intersection of biology and psychology that sufferers 'have a genetic predisposition to be upset' might possibly be taken as sufferers 'have an inherited right to be upset,' which is something I've been seeing more of in the world, and something that I am reading between the lines in the article--and even in the diagnoses itself, Misophonia.

We know no one is perfect, and most of us are far from it, but are we headed to a future where we are all walking baskets of 'scientifically-diagnosed' defects that we must tolerate (that we really don't fully understand if we're honest about it--the brain is still, for the most part, an unsolved mystery)? I think it's important to be respectfully tolerant of genetic defects, i.e. mistreating a deaf person would really upset me, because we know a deaf person cannot 'get over it;' but can we really know the same about the plethora of new neurological conditions such as this one? It's possible there might be something about scientific journalism that is selling itself for more than its worth here, but maybe that's not true, it just doesn't appear there is enough to know right now but I see that admission nowhere in these kind of articles.

[sampo]

> I think it's important to be respectfully tolerant of genetic defects, i.e. mistreating a deaf person would really upset me, because we know a deaf person cannot 'get over it

There have been attempts, though, to make deaf people "get over it" by trying to teach them lip reading, and speaking word even though they cannot hear themselves what they are saying. They have not been very successful.

"In 1980, a vocational school for deaf adolescents was opened in the area of Managua called Villa Libertad. By 1983 there were over 400 deaf students enrolled in the two schools. Initially, the language program emphasized spoken Spanish and lipreading, and the use of signs by teachers was limited to fingerspelling (using simple signs to sign the alphabet)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

[michaelmrose]

Since only a small fraction of people are unable to hear at all to the point where ASL not a hearing aid would be beneficial wouldn't it be easier and more practical to teach them both ASL and lip reading and speaking to the degree that is feasible.

In theory it would be fantastic to get the 95% to all learn ASL to better communicate it doesn't seem likely to happen. ASL for example isn't on my personal to do list not because I don't care but because I have other things higher on the list.

[wallace_f]

That's interesting, however it sounds as though you're intending this as some kind of disagreement with what I said?

[microcolonel]

Certain types of eating sounds make me angry; but I found that I could grin and bear it if I rationalized it. I think it's probably more productive for people to manage it than to insist that nobody make eating sounds around them.

P.S: I think it's important to draw a distinction between feeling annoyed and feeling angry. In the case of this, the feeling is definitely anger, the same way I feel when somebody I care about is being wronged.

[kingkawn]

The way people freely judge until the experience is given a scientific name is the problem.

[BurningFrog]

What says that being obnoxious and whiny isn't a measurable neurophysiological condition?

I'm only half sarcastic.

[orange_fritter]

The actual journal article contains more specifics that may help direct further research.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...

You're right that the BBC article is titled inappropriately. One sentence of the scientific paper's conclusion indicates that the problem is far from "cracked":

> With the available data, it is not possible to decide whether misophonia is a cause or consequence of atypical interoception, and further work is needed to delineate the relation between the two.

I don't find brain activity to be boring and I'm willing to put up with researchers trying in earnest to gain any insight into misophonia; this seemingly laughable condition drastically impacts my daily experience.

[d23]

As someone who was hoping the article would have some kinds of solutions or cures, I was pretty disappointed by this.

[mikekchar]

I suffer from this (or at least I think I do -- I get irrationally angry at certain noises). One thing that has surprisingly helped me has been repeated exposure.

I worked for 5 years at a Japanese high school and quite a few of the noises that drive me batty (slurping drinks/soup and .. cutting finger/toe nails, if you can believe it) happen frequently in the teacher's room. High schools in Japan are different from those in the west in that teachers don't get their own class rooms. They have to do all their prep work in a large, cramped, noisy, open-concept office (with no dividers). So I was exposed on all sides.

Some things that really helped me is that I'm a programmer by training, not a teacher. Working as a programmer requires a lot more concentration than working as a teacher. When I was doing my prep work, I could mechanically carry on most of my tasks even when I was absolutely enraged by the environment.

Because I was working on contract, I didn't have to work as much overtime as a regular teacher. This gave me plenty of time to program in the office. At first it was impossible, but over time I was able to work a bit and then just sit there for however long it took for me to calm down. Then I would work a bit more. Eventually, I could calm down quite quickly. These days I'm quite good at recognising when I'm starting to get angry and do whatever it is that calms me down (even I don't really understand what that is, unfortunately).

Not super detailed, but I hope it gives you some hints on things you can try.

[adam]

I've found that having some sort of background noise going, whether it's music or news or whatever, really helps minimize the extreme "skin crawling" feeling I get listening to people eat, breathe loudly, slurp soup, or whatever it may be. So now I will rarely sit down with my family for dinner without putting on some music first!

[wampwamp]

The article mentions "targeted electricity passed through the skull" as a possible treatment by "adjusting brain function". That seems a bit extreme to me, unless of course your condition is truly debilitating or causes you to become recklessly violent with noisy eaters.

[jayajay]

"Why does X happen?" is not a useful question. We can ask "How does X happen?". Consider the reframing "What is the correlation between me getting angry and other abstract things happening around me when someone is eating an apple?" used by psychologists and data scientists. Maybe this can provide you with a more practical answer. Maybe you are upset that they are eating and not sharing, or that they are eating and you are not, etc. Neuroscientists would be interested in what the brain is doing when something like this happens, e.g. the inter-region dynamics of getting angry in response to seeing/hearing others eat. It is not a boring question, at all. But I see your point, most people are interested in a practical answer, not in brain dynamics.

[jamesrcole]

> "Why does X happen?" is not a useful question

"Why" is the cornerstone of evolutionary biology, in the sense of why was this feature adaptive (at least in our evolutionary past, if not any more). It can give you a deeper understanding of something

[jayajay]

Evolution is a nice framework but, like Hund's rules, it warrants further investigation; it answers "what happened" but not "how it happened". Heuristics are pseudo-solutions and don't necessarily conduce a deep understanding. I guess I should have said "asking 'why?' is eventually useless".

[hueving]

>They showed that an emotional response was correlated with neural behavior... what else could it have been?

Well at least we have a confirmation that emotions are real. :)

[maj0rhn]

Does the definition of the disorder exclude a mere conditioned response? I would have liked to see a control group that included people who were conditioned to have an aversive reaction to a particular sound.

Seeing as how "misophonia" is a named condition, I suspect that it is somehow different from conditioned responses. Can misophonia be deprogrammed?

[Paul-ish]

But that does seem like the first step to answering the question.

[chris_wot]

I'm trying to understand why seeing what the brain looks like after hearing someone eat an apple is not interesting?

[brockf]

I never said it wasn't the first step, but it's heralded (by the media at least) as much more than that -- an explanation or a conclusion.