You Bug Me. Now Science Explains Why.

NPR:

Traffic. Mosquitoes. People who snap their gum. People who crack their knuckles. There are so many things in the world that are just downright annoying.

But what makes them annoying? It’s the question that NPR Science Correspondent Joe Palca and Science Friday’s Flora Lichtman set out to answer in their new book, Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us.

For instance, why is hearing someone else’s phone call more irritating than just overhearing a normal conversation? In an interview with Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne, Lichtman explains why this is so grating.

“It’s half of a conversation,” she says. “Your brain goes into this mode where you start trying to predict what that person is going to say next. The thing that’s frustrating about a cellphone conversation is that it’s very hard to predict, which is one of the things that we found makes something annoying.”

A study by a graduate student at Cornell University experimented with this idea of predicting speech by taking half of a conversation and garbling the words. Even though the test subjects couldn’t understand half of what was being said, the annoying effects went away. “It’s not just about the sound intruding your space,” Lichtman says. “It seems to be about the speech itself.”

Listen here: NPR