Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity
Importance: 4 | # | acx, biology, psychology
Misophonia is a condition in which people can’t tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape.
How did I get this way? Self-report is unreliable, but I remember when I was seven years old I would make noise and bother my parents. In the process of telling me not to do this, my dad complained to me that when he was in the process of falling asleep, there was about a fifteen minute window of half-asleepness where any interruption would jolt him awake so thoroughly that he wouldn’t be able to try falling asleep again for hours. Something about that resonated with me, and since then I’ve been the same way. Was I always like that, and his comment just called my attention to it? That’s not how I remember things, but who knows?
Then when I was twenty-five or so, this trouble with falling asleep was a big enough deal that I would always be telling my roommate to keep it down. One night my roommate complained that I seemed to have some weird pathological problem with noise way outside the normal distribution. I’d never thought about it before, but again, something resonated, that became “part of my identity” against my will, and from then on I was intolerable about any noise-related issue. Again, the simple explanation is that I was already like that - hence my roommate telling me I was like that. Again, that’s now how I remember things.
I talk a big talk, but so far knowing all of this hasn’t helped me tolerate noise more, not even a little bit.
Well worth a read - if only for the skillful writing. One would expect Scott to drill down and figure out something profound, but this is only a clear description of his own beliefs and kinda how they came to be that way. I am reminded of How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor.