Screaming Crazy Prank
Channel: GloferTube
Date: 17/07/2021

Why screams are so scary

Now, scientists have discovered one reason a fearful scream is so effective at making our hair stand on end: It has auditory qualities that no other human vocalization shares. These unique properties may explain how our brains recognize and react to a scream so quickly, and could inform the generation of new alarm systems.

Few people have studied human or animal screams of terror in the past. “There’s been so much attention paid to understanding speech and song that we’ve really ignored this much more innate vocalization until now,” says Tecumseh Fitch, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Austria, who was not involved in the work. The results of the new human scream analysis could shed light on how some of the earliest forms of communication evolved, he adds.

To scrutinize the qualities of humanmade noises, from everyday conversation or public speeches to operas, scientists have typically relied on a few conventional ways of visualizing the sounds. They can graph the pressure of soundwaves, or they can plot the frequencies of these soundwaves over time. But the only thing these approaches reveal about screams is that they are louder and higher pitched than normal speech, says neuroscientist David Poeppel of New York University. “And lots of other things are loud and high-pitched.”