Have you ever found yourself in a particular situation and suddenly you felt a rush of
adrenaline?
Of course you have, and this reaction in your body is sometimes called the fight or flight
response, or in more scientific terms, an acute stress response.
Your body releases a flood of hormones and you prepare for danger, and this has been
going on since men walked around with spears on the lookout ferocious saber-tooth cats.
It’s quite a thing to happen to you and when it does your heart rate will increase,
as will your blood pressure and breathing rate.
It might even be an hour before you settle down again.
But did you know a mere noise can set the response off?
Let’s now have a look at what sounds cause this.
Just so you know, according to Harvard Health the acute stress response can happen when
information is sent to the brain from the eyes but also the ears.
The information is sent to a part of the brain called the amygdala and it is interpreted;
after which it sends a distress signal to another part of the brain called the hypothalamus.
As many of you know, sometimes we over-react, but hey, we need this survival mechanism.
7.
Ghosts and Ghouls During the Vietnam War, the American military
quite literally wanted to freak Vietnamese soldiers out.
They planned a PSYOPS operation called “Operation Wandering Soul” and part of this was to
use noises to scare the soldiers.
They pretty much made a mix-tape that they knew would put those soldiers on edge.
The American psychologists were well aware that ghosts in this part of the world are
taken seriously, and so they got to work.
They made something called “Ghost Tape Number 10”, which is a kind of mash-up of Buddhist
funeral music with just a lot of horrible sounds.
It was certainly not something the Vietnamese soldiers wanted to hear at night as they hid
in the jungle.
The Americans would usually attach great big speakers to boats and helicopters and then
press play.
Have a listen to this tape now:
One commander said this about the noise they created, “The tape was so effective that
we were instructed not to play it within earshot of the South Vietnamese forces, because they
were as susceptible as the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army.”
He said it totally freaked those guys out and made them think about their wandering
dead compatriots and the fact they could be next.
That was the war of course, but there’s a reason we have something called scary music.
It’s used in horror movies for the express purpose of getting under your skin and kicking
off that fight or flight response.
That tape worked on the Vietnamese soldiers, but different kinds of music or sounds that
remind you of death or dying or ghosts or ghouls will similarly trigger a response in
you.
6.
Radio Gaga Now and again people report hearing plain
freaky things coming out of the radio.
These transmissions lead to those stress hormones filling the brain and in this case it’s
not so much that it reminds people of something, like those Vietnamese soldiers thinking of
death, it's just the fact that the unknown puts us on edge.
You might have all said at one time in your life, “What the hell was that?”
“Did you hear that?”
The unusual freaks us out because it could spell danger.
It’s the same with images.
If you suddenly see something you’ve never seen before hobbling down the street at night
coming towards you, you will likely feel a rush of blood to the head.
It might get closer and you just realize it’s some dude dressed up, but for the ensuing
minutes you’ll still be in fight or flight mode.
Sounds cause the same reaction.
If one day you’re listening to songs on the radio and then you hear something weird
spill out you’ll be rocketed into fight or flight mode.
Here is an example of what people have heard through their radios:
And listen to this one which New Yorkers might have heard on WKCR radio in 1995.
It freaked a lot of people out for good reason, and they were all in fight or flight mode.
We should say there are no news reports of this that we can find, just people talking
about it.
No one knows where this came from.
Some people think it was something to do with the paranormal, but more down to Earth thinkers
feel it was likely just someone experimenting.
The radio station is owned by a university, so it might have been a student just messing
around.
5.
Louds Bangs We might be stating the obvious here, but
loud bangs come in many shapes and sizes and you might not know that they are continually
stressing you out.
That’s one reason, besides protecting your hearing, that you might want to wear ear protection.
Gunshots of course stimulate your brain in this way, but even the distant sound of a
car crash, or a crate falling, or if you’re unlucky enough, an earthquake wrecking a building,
will trigger a lot of adrenaline.
Even if you live in a really noisy city or a noisy factory, you could be continually
putting yourself under tremendous stress.
Then there are explosions, and trust us, if you hear one of these as you’re sitting
in the park pondering the meaning of life, your brain will be totally flooded and you’ll
be sent right into flight or flight mode.
For good reason loud bangs quickly make us think about survival.
Listen to this and we’ll get you there now:
Or listen to this, the sound of an Earthquake that was captured in Iran.
Hear this and you will soon consider the option of flight.
4.
Rising Tones/screams We associate a rising tone with something
bad because it makes us think something is going to go off.
It’s kind of like listening to a panic attack.
“Oh God, what is that sound, what is going to happen.”
This makes you think you are in danger.
Listen to this:
We might also consider the rising sound of a voice.
When someone squares up to you, you might not immediately consider them a threat.
Sometimes people will use their voice to frighten you, so they get louder and louder.
This is supposed to put you in either fight or flight mode.
Usually they might just want you to get away, to run away.
But now your stress hormones are well and truly flooding into your brain.
You are looking at that person and you decide, nah, I choose fight.
It’s the same when we hear a scream.
We know that sound means something terrible has happened, and if you are walking down
the street and you hear this around the corner, well, you will definitely feel the immediate
onset of stress:
That’s now stressed us out as we compile this list, but the scream is there for a good
reason.
It’s prepares us and so it’s good for us in many cases.
Hail the scream.
3.
Good Alert systems These are there for good reason too and that’s
to warn you something very bad is coming your way.
Imagine the USA was under threat of nuclear attack or had just been attacked.
You would hear an alert and it’s supposed to put you in fight or flight mode.
The U.S. has something called the Emergency Alert System or EAS and it might be sounded
to warn you about an attack but also if some very bad weather is coming your way.
Have a listen to one example:
That might not sound too bad, but trust us, if you heard it being played really loud in
the streets you’d get stressed by it.
During the war when the UK was being bombed from above, citizens would hear the air raid
alarm, and this would put folks into fight or flight mode.
Here’s what this sounded like to those scared Brits:
But it’s the Japanese early warning sounds for earthquakes and tsunamis that sounds really
awful, and the Japanese are well aware that if they hear this destruction could be not
far away.
When people heard it after the not too recent Japanese tsunami they would quickly follow
the subsequent order to get to higher ground.
In this case no one obviously chose “fight” as a response since torrents of water filled
with tons of dangerous debris is not something someone can fight.
Flight is the only option.
Here’s how that sounds:
2.
Bad Alert Systems The last alert you need to hear is one that
is broken, but according to some sources, in Chicago they had an alert that was messed
up.
We looked into this, and it seems it wasn’t broken, it was just there to get them moving.
It’s a really horrible sound no doubt, leading some people to call it “the ice cream truck
from hell” and “the most evil thing in the world.”
Imagine you heard this in a neighborhood near you:
That’s just creepy and you’d think the local government was purposefully trying to
drive people mad.
If you heard that you might not hide from a tornado but start loading your gun.
In this case we think Chicago might have got it wrong, because while alerts are supposed
to get you prepared for something dangerous, they are not there to make you freeze and
possibly urinate on the spot.
This is the reason when bad weather is on its way you don’t hear sounds like the screams
we played earlier.
As one person wrote in a comment under a video of this alert, “Man, Chicago you know how
to scare away the tornado and all of the city.”
1.
Angry animals Last but not least, animal sounds might induce
fight or flight mode and we are not talking about birds chirping or puppies barking.
Let’s try and set the scene.
Close your eyes and for a moment pretend you are not watching YouTube and instead are camping
out in the woods and are all snug in your tent.
You are awake but on your way to sleeping, and then you hear any one of these sounds
right at the side of the tent.
With such sounds you might consider either fight or flight, but we are guessing if you
are not armed staying put might be the best option.
That said, when you see the tent get shredded fight might be your only option.
Here are the sounds:
Can you guess what animals they were?
In order they were lion, alligator, tiger, elephant and gorilla.
For your own safety you better hope it was the gorilla outside your tent.
We could have mentioned a bunch of other sounds that might start a person’s heart beating
fast.
We are sure some of you might say the scariest thing you’ve ever heard is the sound of
your mother when she is enraged.
We went to forums where people discussed what were the scariest things they had ever heard,
and it seems thunder freaks a lot of people out.
Others get scared by hurricane winds or pretty much any animal that howls.
Cats making out also gets a lot of people scared.
A former soldier wrote that the sound of a weapon being locked and loaded would get his
heart beating fast, but of course that was a situation in which the sound was a threat.
A guy from Chile said the sound of the big earthquake there in 2011 and what happened
after really freaked him out and he’ll never forget what he heard that day.
This is how he described it: “It was my first big earth tremor, and it
lasted some minutes.
You could hear glass breaking, things falling from the kitchen counters, porcelain figures
clinking and exploding against the ground…lamps swinging side to side, car alarms ringing,
trees creaking and their leaves swishing, dogs barking, people screaming and crying,
and dominating all the sounds, the rumbling of the earth.”
We think he’s got a point, that would frighten anyone.
So then, which of these sounds freaked you out the most.
Do you feel in fight or flight mode now after watching this?
What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever heard?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other episode Scary Internet Websites You Should Never Visit.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like share and subscribe.
See you next time.