Josh Clark

Do I sound like a Muppet-y tenor?

I do.

And then this stuff is sent to the brainstem, which basically says, okay, larynx and vocal cords and lungs and abdominal muscles, let's talk.

That's normal speech.

And again, it requires a lot of higher brain processing.

Screaming uses a different set of equipment to to make itself happen.

It's nuts because you think screaming is a form of speech.

It's actually not, even though we use a lot of the same stuff, a lot of the same bait and tackle, say, like it's its own thing, which is I just find this is where I'm like, OK, this is super fascinating now.

Yeah, once the scream comes out of someone else, when we hear that scream, it puts us in fight-or-flight mode before we're even consciously aware that we have heard a scream.

That's how finely tuned we are to responding to screams.

Which, again, this is something you just think exists out there.

And then when you dig in, you're like, my God.

So there's like a whole set of processes that take place that, again, are different than how we would respond if we hear regular speech, right?

So it follows some of the same processes.

It hits the outer ear, goes through the ear canal.

The eardrum goes boom, boom, boom.

That is amplified in the middle ear, and that goes on to the cochlea, which triggers a wave along the basilar membrane, which says, I'm going to turn this into an electrical signal, sends it to the auditory nerve, which sends it to the brainstem, and then to the thalamus.

And the thalamus is the sensory clearinghouse.

It sends this to that and that to that.

All of your sensory information goes to the thalamus.