Why does the human cry instantly attract our attention?

When you sit down in the stuffy train car during rush hour, you are not puzzled by the lack of available seats. You are ready to put up with crowds of people squeezing past you, with the lack of air conditioning and your own fatigue. But when the baby is shouting around, it becomes an unbearable moral torture for you. From now on, you are focused on this little screaming lump and you dream that there will be silence in the car. Let's talk about why scream attracts people's attention.

The unique property of human screams

Neurophysiologists from the University of New York recently found out that human crying has a unique property that activates not only the auditory zones of the brain, but also the areas responsible for fear. If you ask any passer on the street to describe the scream, for sure many will focus on the volume and pitch of the sound. Communicating, we often highlight a range of voice and intonation of some important information. When a person screams, he really wants to be heard. It probably transmits a signal of danger, and this can indeed be useful in a communicative context.

Progress of the experiment

Researchers from New York used cries from videos on YouTube, and also attracted volunteers. As a result, it was found that the sound oscillations very quickly reach a certain range of audible spectrum. Here is what one of the authors of the study, psychology professor David Poppel says: "As a result of our experiments, we found that screams occupy a whole niche in the auditory spectrum. We tested a great variety of sounds and made sure that the territory in which they exist is unique in its kind. " Note that scientists compared screams, singing and spoken language (including in foreign languages).

What are the screams and car alarms like?

It is curious that alarm signals (for example, car alarms) affect the human ears as well as wild cries. These noises have a common property, which is called the amplitude-frequency response, which reflects how quickly the sound changes its volume. Human speech, as a rule, falls within the range of 1 Hz, and cries and alarms can fluctuate between 30 and 150 Hz. When subjects in a New York study were asked which sounds seemed to them the most frightening, invariably the signals with high amplitude-frequency characteristics were called.

What happens in the brain?

Researchers also observed the activity of the brain of volunteers while listening to screams. In this case, the method of magnetic resonance imaging was used. As a result, the subjects had increased cerebral activity in the amygdala. This area of the brain is responsible for emotions and the treatment of fear. Keep this in mind when next time you are going to watch a horror movie.