Schneier on Security

vas pup • July 14, 2017 8:19 AM

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170714-the-brain-hacking-sound-thats-impossible-to-ignore
“He was inspired by the neuroscience research of Luc Arnal at the University of Geneva. Arnal had investigated what neural connections are activated when humans hear a sound that is particularly difficult to ignore: screaming.
Scans revealed that, when we hear the characteristically rough, distressing sound of a scream, the amygdala – which processes fear reactions – is activated in our brains. “What I found is that this roughness doesn’t go through the same neural pathways used by speech,” he says.
It means that screams don’t just get our attention, they immediately prompt us to react in some way. We’re stimulated to actually do something. It was Arnal’s innate and, of course, irrepressible response to hearing his own new-born baby’s cries that helped to provoke his investigations.
Arnal had previously suggested that this insight could be used to design better alarms and sirens that don’t just make us freeze when we hear them, but actually invoke a more constructive reaction.
Experimental noise
To get the sound to work for the mobile clinics in Malawi, Harper spent months experimenting with audio software called Kyma to try and come up with a noise that sounded man-made enough to distinguish it from human or animal voices in the bush, but which was also not overly harsh or distressing. Getting the balance right – appealing to the emotion-processing parts of the brain without inducing fear or shock – was tough.
Our understanding of how audio influences human psychology has evolved greatly in recent years, according to Annett Schirmer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. For example, studies have shown that people’s neural activity can be co-ordinated with the help of external rhythms. This is exactly the sort of effect you would expect from, say, factory or farm labourers working in time to a song – or the effect of cohesion observed in musicians performing together.
“Music stimulation trains certain mental processes and aligns them between individuals – that’s a really cool thing,” says Shirmer.
She says the Malawi experiment was an interesting one, and agrees that behavioural manipulation could certainly be enhanced with the right sounds. However, she warns there is also a dark side to using music to alter behaviour.
“Shops use music to make customers stay longer or increase the likelihood that they purchase things,” she notes.
In the future, sound that provokes responses deep in our brains could be more thoughtfully designed into the built environment. Often, the music or signals around us fade into the background. But if the right neural pathways are triggered, they might one day be impossible to ignore.