Dear V,
I
live with my grandfather and he becomes incredibly jittery whenever I play my
zombie apocalypse games. Even worse is when my cell phone rings (and yeah they’re
gunshots cuz guns are cool!), he also jumps up like a freaking jitter bug. I
have had it with this over the top reaction, I know he disapproves of my choice
of ringtones and hobbies but he could at least tell it to my face. In any case,
what’s his deal? I asked my mom and she told me that my grandfather went to a
war or something… but seriously… that was like centuries ago…
-Bart
Yow Bart!
Give
the old man a break. I’m not going to nitpick on details regarding your
personal relationship with your grandfather but from what you just wrote, I’m
betting that he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and yes
it might have been decades ago (I doubt your grandfather was alive centuries
ago to begin with) there would still be remnant effects of such.
Let’s
look at it this way. I’m pretty sure you become happy whenever you hear the
sound that signals an in-game achievement, right? Or when you listen to your
rock songs (or whatever you kids nowadays enjoy) you get hyped, right? Those
two situations show how powerfully sound can affect our emotions.
It
can work the other way around as well. Our emotions can actually affect how we
hear and process sound. When particular sounds become associated in our brain
with strong emotions, hearing similar sounds can evoke those same feelings,
even far removed from their original context. Do you see where I am getting at?
This phenomenon is commonly seen in combat veterans suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which is likely the case for your
grandfather. A pair of researcher has discovered how fear can actually increase
or decrease the ability to discriminate among sounds depending on context;
their findings give a new insight into the distorted perceptions of PTSD
sufferers like your grandfather. The researchers thinks that there’s a strong link between mechanisms that control
emotional learning, including fear generalization, and the brain mechanisms
responsible for PTSD, where generalization of fear is abnormal but
future research should focus on defining and studying this link. (Aizenberg & Geffen, 2013)
Again give the old man a break. I would sound preachy but
for his sake it would be best to lower the volume when you’re playing and
change your ringtone to something else.
Senseryly yours,
V
Reference:
American
Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric
Publishing. pp. 271–280. ISBN 978-0-89042-555-8.
Aizenberg, M., & Geffen, M. N. (2013).
Bidirectional effects of aversive learning on perceptual acuity are mediated by
the sensory cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 16(8), 994-996. doi: 10.1038/nn.3443
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http://www.sleepwellblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/sleep-problems-kids.jpg
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