Joe Palca - Annoying

As long as that’s clear, for the sake of argument, she’s willing to say that her Fierce mice appear to be easily annoyed. She’s even found a gene that seems to be responsible for this behavior. It’s got a catchy name: NR2E1 . This gene seems to play an important role in brain development in mammals, although it’s also found in fruit flies (small brains), roundworms (really, really small brains), and sponges (no brains at all). Without reference to the question of whether sponges can get annoyed, Simpson says mice that are missing the NR2E1 gene exhibit the Fierce phenotype. There’s that word again. In this case, it refers not only to the mouse’s physical appearance but to its behavior as well.

Humans also have a version of NR2E1 . In fact, if you put a healthy human NR2E1 gene into a Fierce mouse that’s missing NR2E1 , the mouse loses its hyperagressive behavior and turns back into a normal mouse. What happens when the human NR2E1 gene is missing or mutated? Simpson is trying to answer that question. Already she has some hints that the gene might be damaged in patients with bipolar disorder.

Simpson says that the Fierce strain is interesting to study for what it might explain about the genetics of human behavior, but mice of this strain are not easy to study. Not long after Simpson started to breed these mice at the Jackson Laboratory, her lab technician came to her and said, “I quit. I can’t stand working with these mice.”

“I understood what she meant,” Simpson says. “These mice are difficult to handle, difficult to breed, and a pain in the neck to work with. Basically, these mice are incredibly annoying.”

So while it may not be possible to say for sure whether a mouse is annoyed, at least Simpson knows how to make a mouse annoying.

Sometimes sounds annoy people and it’s not about the sound’s intrinsic characteristics and it’s not about personal taste. It’s about the listener. Certain people have special sensitivities. Remember Linda Bartoshuk and her supertasters? Think of Lucy Fitz Gibbon as a superlistener. As with most superpowers, superlistening sounds like a good thing, unless you’re the one who has to live with it.

Fitz Gibbon received her undergraduate degree at Yale University. She has brown hair and wears brown-framed glasses and seems perfectly easygoing, except when she describes the scanner in her office at the Yale Center for British Art, where she works part time. She calls it her Waterloo. It’s loud. It’s repetitive. It’s often in use. This seems more like a minor annoyance, however, not a disastrous military defeat. Yet when Lucy recalls the tone, which she hums, she can’t help but squint and crumple her brow. “It’s so bad. The pitch that it makes is just flat of a C natural.”

Lucy has perfect pitch and years of musical training—which can be a deadly combination for aural annoyance. Perfect pitch, which researchers call absolute pitch, is classically defined as the ability to identify notes without the use of a reference tone. What it means is that whenever Lucy walks down the street, she hears musical notes in sounds that most people experience as noise. Every buzz, rumble, and honk has a pitch associated with it. “Most objects, if they’re moving—like the fan in your computer or the buzzing in your light bulb—make some sort of overtone,” says Lucy. And most of the time, those notes are not in tune.

A walk in New Haven quickly reveals how differently Lucy experiences the world. A big blue truck idling on High Street: “It’s an E flat.” The crosswalk bell by Yale’s largest dining hall, “Commons,” rings slightly flat of a C natural. “I’m pretty sure that it’s the exact same pitch of the bells in my high school that used to ring to tell you to go to class. The first time I heard it, I had this Pavlovian response, and I was back in high school, thinking, ‘Must get to biology.’” It’s common for people with perfect pitch to have excellent tonal memory as well, researchers say.

With great power comes great annoyance. Lucy says that her case isn’t so extreme. “I had a friend who used to say that every morning before he got up, he would have to sit in his room and meditate so that he wouldn’t be driven crazy by all of the sounds that he would encounter during the day. I’m not quite like that. If I’m having sort of a nervous or irritable day, I think I tend to pay more attention to sounds that annoy me. But for the most part, you have to block it out. Just like you can’t pay attention to every piece of sensory information that’s coming through; otherwise, you end up overwhelmed.”

But it takes some effort to tune out sounds that are out of tune. Imagine that you are Lucy as a college senior. You sit down to write your senior thesis about the opera La Callisto by Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli. You’re interested in exploring how “it functions as a criticism of the Venetian practice of forced monachization.” (We had to look up the word monachization , too: it’s a noun meaning “the act or process of becoming a monk or of becoming or making monastic.”)

You turn on your laptop, and it starts to hum. “My laptop usually starts off just south of an F sharp,” Lucy says, “and then sits around just south of a G sharp for a while, and eventually winds up just south of a C natural. It changes, depending on how fast the fan is running in the computer.” It was annoying, but, fortunately, between voice lessons (she’s a soprano), a graduate-level chamber music class, her lead as Deidamia in Francesco Sacrati’s La Finta Pazza , and learning Pierrot Lunaire , Lucy mostly hears her own voice—singing in tune.

Tutto a posto —everything is in its place.

About fifteen years ago, David Ross also spent a great deal of time on the Yale campus, singing. Today he’s a professor of psychiatry. He hasn’t left Yale—after doing his undergraduate work there, he went on to complete an M.D./Ph.D. at the Yale School of Medicine.

As an undergrad, Ross was a singer in Redhot & Blue, an a cappella group at Yale. He recalls that the director of the group had perfect pitch. “At that point, I really didn’t even know what that meant. She would ask me to do stuff that didn’t make sense. She’d say, ‘Can’t you just sing a C? Can’t you hear that’s a quarter of a step flat?’” Ross, however, couldn’t do either of those things. “It was incredibly annoying to go through this experience.”

It’s true. Being told to fix something when you don’t know the difference between fixed and broken and being reprimanded for something you can’t control are annoying. (In fact, as we’ll see later, these are simple and foolproof ways to annoy people if you’re conducting an experiment on frustration.)

Ross and the group director were hearing the same notes but experiencing them differently—Ross wanted to know why. He continues to study this question, now in his own lab. He says that the acoustic world is a mental minefield for people with perfect pitch. “They notice stuff that we don’t,” Ross says. “Radio stations will speed up or slow down a song to make it fit in the time spot that they have. So if they have three minutes, they might play a song that’s supposed to be three minutes and five seconds and simply speed it up. Well, that’s also increasing the pitch. We don’t notice that, but people with perfect pitch do. And it might be really annoying.”

Why is it annoying, though? People with absolute pitch talk about pitch differently than we do. Ross says, “They describe pitch as having a fundamental salience that’s present for them but absent for us.” It’s as if pitches have identities. “That a B flat sounds like a B flat because it just does.”