Wednesday 26 December 2012

What Is The Most Annoying Sound In The World?

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It's so universal that it's become a cliché: nails on a chalkboard! When it comes to noises that bother everyone's ears, it's seemingly a given that scraping fingernails across a slate board is the one that everyone hates most. But when a group of neuroscientists decided to test which sounds most upset the human brain, they discovered that fingernails on a chalkboard isn't number one.

It's not even number two. As part of their research, published last week in the Journal of Neuroscience, they put 16 participants in an MRI machine, played them a range of 74 different sounds and asked them to rate which were most annoying.

4 comment(s):

Anonymous said...

The wife's voice?

Seriously, it's steel grating on steel, like in rubbing two knives together at the edges. Sets my teeth on edge.

Ima said...

Nail clipping is in my top 5. Blech.

NotMarian said...

Just looking at that photo of the hand on the blackboard made my skin crawl.

Anonymous said...

The "Achy Breaky" song...