Why Do Things Sound Scary?

If you sometimes feel scared and are ashamed of it after, don’t be. It is a good thing. It means that you are alive and all of your ancestors successfully avoided death at least for a while. It also means that you come from a very long line of people who are good at being scared. Grab your chair folks, this is a story of sound, science and fear.

Fans of scary movies know that there are primarily two was movies use sound to scare you: your jump right off the corner trick, or, use sound to set a generally more frightening mood. If sound is nothing more than vibrations, what is about our biology that makes only some of them so scary? And we are not talking about that creepy kind of scary that grabs you slowly with its cold ethereal hands. That slow fear only happens when your higher brain functions take over. Here we are talking about instant fear, the fear that is built into our very biology.

So why do we get scared in the first place? Easy. So we could live long enough to reproduce. If you want to avoid being a lion’s dinner you have to think fast. Luckily, sound moves faster than sight. Wasn’t this the other way round? Yes, in physics, but not in our biology – our brain gets in the line first. Despite the fact that light travels faster than sound, our brains take much longer to process that light into an image. A millisecond too long for us to react. So, we are wired to have sound as the first alarm.

And what happens then? We wouldn’t want to spoil your fun by saying anything more! Grab yourselves a cup of coffee and enjoy the rest of the video!