Why Do We Scream When We Get Scared?

                                                                      Source - Mentalfloss


Whether you're watching a scary movie or visiting some scary places; fear always
causes the same reaction "a scream", but why? what causes us to scream when we scared.

When you're afraid your body automatically goes into survival mode. Think about the faces you make when you're afraid, your eyes get big and wide and darts back and forth, which makes you much more alert to everything around you including potential threats.

You'll also start bleeding much faster through your nose which gives you a
heightened sense of smell when sensing danger, fear just like any other emotion
causes you to make facial expressions, which in turn affect your emotions in the
same way that smiling can make you happier or frowning can make you sad. 

Making a scared face will heighten all your senses so, that you're extra alert for any danger; so that's why we get scared and make a frightening face but why do we scream?


Research Offers Some Facts

Screaming, though, is an unusual noise. Research infers when we scream in fear,
the noise serves the two purpose of sharpening our focus in the face of a threat as well as of cautioning others.

Actually, our brains interpret screams in a unique way. Largely noises we hear
enters from our ear to an area of the brain dedicated to interpreting a sound and
making sense of these sounds: such as gender, age, and tone; high or low; or
electric instrument and what animal makes that sound.

Screams, though, don’t seem to follow that path. According to research conducted by David Poeppel, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and his co-authors that looked into what happens in the body when people scream in fear and found that the scream goes from the ear to the amygdala, the brain’s fear processing part.

Amygdala is a nucleus in the brain primarily sensitive to information about fear and stimulates the body’s fight-or-flight reaction, which implies that screams are naturally considered not just sound but a stimulus for heightened awareness.

By analyzing the samples of screams People and his team found “roughness,” as a measure of how fast a sound changes in loudness. While normal speech manages to be less rough, vary between 4 hertz to 5 hertz per second, a human scream is highly rough, ranging in volume somewhere between 30 to 150 hertz per second.

That large variation in scream roughness is a clue to how our brains react to danger sounds, Poeppel says. Screaming serves not only to express danger but also to cause fear in the listener and heighten awareness for both screamer and listener to counter to their environment.


Conclusion

Well, experts don't know for sure but the leading theory is that it serves as a big loud defense against danger. See, it's a little bit like a human car alarm if someone is in danger or scared and they scream they're sending out a distress signal that could either cause someone to take notice or scare away whatever danger lurks.

In fact, studies have shown that the more intense, wild and animalistic a scream is the harder it is for other people to ignore it. So, why do we scream? to help keep us safe.

Written By - Sukhvinder Gaur

Edited By - Vanshu Verma

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