Why Do Certain Sounds Fill Some People With Rage?

You’re sitting at a dinner table. Someone is chewing. The sound is ordinary — barely audible, irrelevant to almost everyone present.

For some people, this sound produces a response that is difficult to overstate: immediate, intense rage, disgust, or panic. Not mild annoyance. Not a preference. Something that feels physical, involuntary, and impossible to reason away while it’s happening.

This condition is called misophonia — literally, “hatred of sound” — and it was largely dismissed by the medical establishment for years on the grounds that it was exaggerated sensitivity or an anxiety expression. Brain imaging research has since established that it is a distinct neurological phenomenon.

The Newcastle Study

In 2017, Sukhbinder Kumar and colleagues at Newcastle University published a landmark fMRI study of misophonia that provided the first clear neurological evidence.

Subjects with and without misophonia listened to three types of sounds: misophonic trigger sounds (chewing, breathing, lip-smacking), generally unpleasant sounds (screaming, retching), and neutral sounds.

In subjects without misophonia, the trigger sounds produced mild or no negative responses — similar to neutral sounds. In subjects with misophonia, the trigger sounds produced intense negative reactions and dramatic changes in brain activity.

The key finding: the anterior insular cortex (AIC) showed abnormal activation in response to trigger sounds in misophonic subjects. The AIC is involved in integrating sensory information with emotional responses — it’s the region where “this is a sound” and “this is what that sound means for me” get linked.

Additionally, subjects with misophonia showed heightened connectivity between the AIC and regions involved in long-term memory, face processing, and — critically — interoception (sensing the internal state of the body). Their brains were linking the trigger sounds to physiological and autobiographical memories in ways that non-misophonic brains were not.

The response wasn’t imagined. The brain was doing something structurally different with these sounds.

Why Chewing and Breathing?

The specificity of misophonic triggers is one of the condition’s most striking features.

Misophonia is not a general sound sensitivity (that’s hyperacusis, a different condition). It’s not a fear of loud sounds (that’s phonophobia). Misophonic triggers are almost exclusively human or bodily sounds: chewing, swallowing, breathing, sniffing, repetitive tapping, clicking. Occasionally specific environmental sounds that take on personal significance.

The sounds that trigger misophonia are, almost always, sounds that come from people — sounds associated with bodily function, eating, and proximity.

Why these sounds specifically? The Newcastle team speculated that the AIC’s role in processing embodied, first-person experience may be implicated: the trigger sounds may activate a mismatch between a predicted sensory state and an actual one — perhaps something related to the simulation of another’s bodily state creating an unwanted internal echo.

This remains speculative. The triggers are consistent; the mechanism specific to them is not yet fully understood.

The Rage vs. The Awareness

One of the defining features of misophonia is that sufferers know, consciously, that the response is irrational. They know the person chewing is doing something ordinary. They know the sound is trivial.

The knowledge does not help. The rage (or panic, or disgust) arrives independently of the rational understanding that it shouldn’t. This is because the anterior insular cortex’s response appears to run before and separately from the PFC’s evaluation.

This is the same architecture as phobias and other conditioned emotional responses: the emotional response fires before — and faster than — the cortical appraisal that would identify it as disproportionate. By the time you’ve consciously recognized that the sound is just chewing, the body is already in a response state.

The Population and Its Variation

Misophonia exists on a spectrum. At the mild end, people experience irritation and discomfort from trigger sounds that they can manage in most social situations. At the severe end, people experience full panic responses, leave the room, or avoid social situations where triggers might occur.

Estimates of prevalence vary widely — partly because the condition has only recently been formally characterized. Studies suggest somewhere between 10–20% of people report some degree of misophonic response, with perhaps 2–4% experiencing clinically significant impairment.

It often begins in childhood or adolescence, frequently associated with a specific person (a parent, sibling, or classmate) whose sounds trigger the response — though the response tends to generalize over time.

There’s evidence of genetic contribution, and co-occurrence with OCD, anxiety disorders, and ADHD has been documented. But misophonia appears to be a distinct condition rather than a symptom of these others.

What Helps (Somewhat)

There is no established treatment.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) focused on reducing avoidance behaviors and catastrophic thinking about triggers helps some people. Habituation protocols — controlled, incremental exposure to trigger sounds in a safe context — have shown some effectiveness in case studies. Tinnitus retraining protocols (borrowed from auditory desensitization approaches) have been applied with partial success.

Earplugs, white noise, and strategic seating help manage the practical problem. None of these address the underlying mechanism.

The chewing isn’t loud. It isn’t threatening. Everyone at the table hears it and doesn’t care.

For some people, the anterior insular cortex has learned — or is configured — to respond to it as though it matters.

The rational mind can observe that response.

It cannot turn it off.