The sound of fingernails scraped across a blackboard doesn’t bother me at all. From people’s behavior and their descriptions afterward, I guess that their reaction is the same as the one that tearing of ball cotton (such as that used packing the top of vitamin bottles) causes me. For me it is the sensation in my fingers, rather than the sound.
What is it that affects the nervous system this way? Why doesn’t everyone behave the same?
Also, I once knew someone who behaved this same way when glass was ground under foot on concrete. Does anybody else have these unusual sensitivities?
I believe it’s due to the fact that there is a variance in the vibrations produced, which causes several different tones that aren’t harmonically related.
For me it’s styrofoam squeaking as it’s rubbed against cardboard. Fingernails on a chalkboard don’t bother me at all. But that styrofoam, doesn’t matter if I am the one pulling it out the box or not, makes me cringe with my eyes closed.
As for your other questions, I have no idea and look forward to other responses on this.
IIRC, I heard that this kind of stuff is learned. I remember reading somewhere that very small children (<4) don’t distinguish between nice smells and foul smells as the rest of us do, ie. the smell of feces isn’t recognised as “bad” until the kids are toilet trained and learn the meaning of “dirty”. Maybe the same goes for blackboard thing. Maybe some of us just “were away from school that particular day” and never learned to be bothered by it.
Personally, it’s not the sound itself that bothers me, it’s the feel of my own fingers on the blackboard. Unfortunately, the sound always reminds me of the feeling, so I cringe in sympathy.
When I was in grammar school, our music teacher has a wooden block with five evenly space chalk-holding devices. This was used to draw five paralell horizontal lines on the blackboard. I will leave it to the music aficionados to haplessly guess what they were for.
For me, it’s the feeling of rubbing a paper napkin (especially those with smooth surfaces) between my fingers. AHHHH… The cotton bal tearing isn’t good either. The other thing that makes me shiver is feeling or scraping unfinished porcelain.
Now that you mention it, I think I feel the same way. It’s touch, not sound. The sound thing only used to happen to me whenever the teacher’s chalk would slip and let loose a sharp, but thankfully short, SCREEEEEE.
“Apparently, the nail/chalkboard sound is very similar to the warning cry of some monkeys. The authors of the “Chilling Sound” paper suggested that it is possible, just possible, that the response to these annoying sounds is some “leftover” reflex from a common primate ancestor”
That’s very interesting, but the theory doesn’t seem to cover all the things people have talked about here:
Some people (such as me) react to the vibration, not the sound, and aren’t affected this way by any sound.
People don’t seem to be affected by the same sound. What good would a warning sound be if not every monkey (person) was equally affected? Maybe a monkey’s warning covers a whole range of sounds?
That common primate ancestor must have used a completely different sound (or had different hearing), since I’ve never yet run in terror at the sound of chimps in the zoo. Elephants can be pretty scary, tho.
I see now that the specific stimulus varies from person to person, but that the general reaction is the same.
For me it’s attempting to write with a cedar pencil that has the lead broken such that only wood makes contact with the paper. This is the only thing that causes the skin on my back to crawl and my jaws to clench and my whole face to scrunch up like someone just dumped a bucket of ice water down the front of my shorts.
And yes, even imagining the stimulus is enough to evoke the reaction. >shudder<
Personally, I find the fingernails-on-chalkboard phenomenon annoying, but no more so than finding out that my roomate left the light on in the living room at night. It doesn’t bother me.
However, the lack of a conclusive answer inspires me to bump this in the hopes that Cecil and his minions see it and contemplate it for future columns.
After he figures out the Toynbee/Kubick plates, of course.
I have two, and they involve latex balloons. Rubbing one (squeek, squeek, squeek) and inflating one with a helium tank (high-pitched whoosh, sometimes followed with a loud bang).
All of mine seem to involve high pitch/frequency sounds:
Nails on chalkboard
Styrofoam being rubbed together
dog whistles
TV sets
florescent tube lights (God bless the man who invented the halogen lights in my office!)
The cotton thing send chills to, but only when put between my teeth…and then I believe that to be a tactile thing.
Good call on the foil situation Handy. (Love that name) Nothing worse than that reaction it was will your fillings…
I saw a demo where the sound of a three prong garden digger scraping a blackboard was decomposed into individual frequency components (that is, broken up into individual tones). The high pitch tones, when played alone, aren’t bad. It’s the low pitch ones that cause the shivers. I don’t know what to make of that, but it’s neat.