Studying
screams of terror, David Poeppel of New York University and colleagues have
concluded that human screams of terror produce a sound that is unlike any other
made by humans, and contains properties that are not found in any other type of
human speech: male or female, adult or child. Using fMRI, they found that
screams that were rougher more effectively activated the amygdala, which
contains the brain’s fear circuits. By comparison, most other sounds tend to
activate only the auditory cortex of the brain, at least initially. In
addition, people seem to report the direction from which a scream originated
more accurately than other non-terror sounds. The researchers theorize that the
brain is uniquely tuned to screams. These unique properties may explain how our
brains recognize and react to a scream so quickly, and could help develop a new
generation of alarm systems, for one thing.
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