Description
Leave it to a group of new parents to be inspired to study the effects of screaming on the human brain.
David Poeppel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University and director of the Max Planck Institute's Department of Neuroscience in Frankfurt, Germany, normally studies speech and communication. Recently, however, he found himself sharing a laboratory with a group of new parents in New York.
“[They were] in the middle of either having babies, just had babies, or obsessing about how their brains are being hijacked by the screams in their lives,” Poeppel says.
Poeppel and his colleagues know, as people in every culture instinctually know, that screams have a disturbing effect on the human brain. What they didn’t know was why screaming, as opposed to loud singing, or loud laughter, causes humans to feel frightened or alarmed.
In order to figure out how screams work, the scientists began collecting screams. First they looked online, downloading screams from movies.
