Why do some noises, like “nails on a chalkboard”, make us cringe?
In: Biology
This is not really known scientifically, but there are some guesses.
I think the most likely reason is that those sounds are very similar to the sound of tooth being abraded on hard material. It would be very, very bad for you to wear your teeth down (you couldn’t eat, then, and might starve), so your body has a very strong reaction against things sound/feel like that. It is probably a little overactive because it’s better to be overactive rather than underactive in this case.
Specifically, the mechanism would be that ancestors/animals that had this reaction had better teeth on average, and were more likely to survive to have healthy offspring, so over time there were more of them. You’re their descendants.
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