Sounds That Make You Go Barf | Brain Games

I would love for you to give me your honest opinion about our new headphones. Would you like to try them out?

Bring it! Let's go try this one on. Throw them on, check it out. Pick it up, it's so clear. Excellent! Oh, I'll be jamming on the subway with these!

Girl, do it nice! At first, our volunteers are picking up nothing but good vibrations. Love this song! Bo boom! And when you twerk, you can goom.

Yeah, I can't twerk! What they don't realize is we are controlling what they hear from behind the set. But what do you think will happen if we mix in some unsavory sounds?

Offering up a selection of noises, ranging from the merely obnoxious to, "Get me the heck out of here!" [Music] The nails that were coming down, that was really weird because it was like the back of my mouth. The teeth were like, "Now it's like a balloon."

Okay, oh, you love that one? Is it Spice Girls? It appears through my soul! The styrofoam starts in my back, and it just works its way up like this, and then it comes up here, and then it's on my head. Oh, I hate it!

[Music] Yeah, yeah! I don't like that. So it sounds like some... Sorry, what happened? Somebody's throwing up!

When I heard the barf, I felt it in my body, like right here in my stomach. That made me nauseous. So what's going on here? Why do we have such a physical reaction to nothing more than an unpleasant noise?

How does your brain sense sound, and why does it respond so physically to some sounds but not to others? Measured in something called Hertz, sound waves move through the air as vibrations. The higher the frequency, the more powerful the vibrations.

The highly sensitive systems of your inner ear receive these sound waves and send information about them to your brain. Remarkably, many sounds trigger your amygdala, the part of your brain that controls the fight or flight response, suggesting our brains have actually evolved to associate sounds of a certain frequency with danger or distress.

These sounds aren't language, but they do communicate. They are meant to trigger an immediate biological response. So, those shivers you feel are probably tied to our ancient survival instinct.