Joe Palca - Annoying

Larry Squire at the University of California, San Diego, agrees with Tranel’s conclusions. Squire says the part of the brain that is essential for forming and retaining these emotional memories is the amygdala. The amygdala is another part of the limbic system, that portion of the forebrain that also contains the cingulate cortex.

So if the amygdala or some other part of the limbic system is damaged, does that mean, in Tranel’s hypothetical scenario, that the airline passenger would remember that there was a crying baby on his flight but will not feel annoyed by its intermittent crying? Yes, says Squire. “We did that experiment a long time ago with monkeys.” He removed a portion of a monkey’s amygdala and then compared monkeys lacking amygdalas with those whose amygdalas were intact. “We tested them on various emotional reactivity, fearful stimuli. It was only the monkeys without the amygdalas that showed any abnormality on that test.”

There’s one other scenario to consider here. What if, in addition to missing your hippocampus, you’re missing your cingulate cortex as well, and once again, let’s say, you are sitting behind that annoying baby?

The missing hippocampus would prevent you from remembering the last time the baby cried, and the missing cingulate would presumably keep you from becoming annoyed each time you heard it. So, in this scenario, the plane ride with the squalling baby would be, if not bliss, at least no worse than any other plane ride in today’s crowded skies.

Usually, it’s fun to sit in the bleachers. Maybe it’s the altitude, but there’s something easygoing about the patrons up there—bleacher bums dress casually, bring snacks, and seem to have a pretty good time. That also goes for the upper decks of a Broadway theater.

It was a rainy fall evening in Manhattan. Jude Law was playing a particularly well-dressed and anguished Hamlet at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway. The views from the upper decks were good and not obstructed. By the time the prince saw ghostly visions of his father, a pack of cellophane-wrapped Twizzlers was being passed around the last row.

That’s when the problem started. One patron wasn’t amused. Every Twizzler extraction prompted her to whip her head around and shoot icy glares. Then two people nearby slid a box of Good&Plenty out of a backpack. Even the most gingerly shake of the carton produced a loud sigh from the woman. Yet it was the Goobers at stage right that sent the lady over the edge. Without sugarcoating it, she went nuts. “ Stop eating .” It was a whisper-yell, accompanied by a little fist bang on the armrest—but it was loud enough so that heads turned, up and down the aisle.

It’s possible that junk food is this woman’s pet peeve—maybe she’s a dentist or a personal trainer, and it qualifies as a “professional annoyance.” Maybe there’s some cognitive overlay that we could never guess. Or, perhaps a more depressing explanation is that this particular person suffers from a genetic predisposition to getting annoyed.

Sarina Rodrigues is a neuroscientist in the Psychology Department at Oregon State University. Her research points to one way in which genetics could play a role in irritability and what that could mean for treating annoyance. Rodrigues is broadly interested in how our brains process emotions, and her approach is to study oxytocin. It is a chemical that acts as both a neurotransmitter and a hormone and has been implicated in trust, generosity, romantic attachment, and sex. In prairie voles ( Microtus ochrogaster ), oxytocin has been shown to work sort of like Cupid’s arrow. When oxytocin was injected into the brain of a female vole, she rapidly fell for the nearest he-vole around. {50} 50 1. Larry J. Young, “Being Human: Love: Neuroscience Reveals All,” Nature 457(148) (January 8, 2009): 148.

Oxytocin is manufactured in the hypothalamus region of our brains; it acts locally to help brain cells communicate over short distances and travels far afield to places such as the uterus and the heart, where it acts as a hormone. Like all hormones, oxytocin doesn’t do anything without a receptor. The receptor is a protein sticking out of the membranes of cells. When oxytocin wafts by, it engages with the receptor, which sets off a chemical cascade inside the cell. Like a car key, it doesn’t do much on its own, but with a turn, it activates a lot of sophisticated machinery.

Not all cells have all receptors. This is partly why certain hormones have specific effects—because they can interact only with certain cells. And some cells have more receptors than others: in places where reactivity is crucial to keeping us alive, such as where nerves and muscles meet to control our movements, a muscle cell can have ten thousand receptors per square micron.

There are receptors for oxytocin in cells all over the body, from the heart to the nervous system. Oxytocin fits into only one specific receptor, Rodrigues says. It’s as if oxytocin turns on only one make of car, which makes life simpler for the researchers studying it. The oxytocin receptor is coded by a gene on chromosome three. Rodrigues and her colleagues wanted to know whether a variation in this gene had any affect on a person’s behavior—specifically, on a person’s reaction to stress.

Oxytocin calms us down when we’re stressed, Rodrigues says. “It plays a key role in attenuating how much our emotional centers of the brain activate. It can actually calm the brain down. It can also lower heart rate responses during psychosocial stress.”

Stress and annoyance appear to be linked. When we’re stressed, we seem to be at higher risk for getting annoyed, Rodrigues says. “It does seem that annoyance increases when you’re stressed out. You’re much more likely to be annoyed if someone cuts you off in traffic when you’re running late than when you’re in no rush at all. It seems that we have a lower threshold for getting jumpy and irritable when we’re stressed out.”

If running up against an obstacle when you’re trying to achieve a goal puts you at risk for annoyance, stress on top of that practically guarantees it. We’re often stressed when the goal we’re trying to achieve is pressing or important. This may mean that how annoyed we are is less about the size of the obstacle than about the size of the goal.

Researchers, however, are studying another curious connection. It’s likely that the theater shusher had little ability to sympathize with the guy eating the candy. What if the last row of the theater was filled with diabetics who had low blood sugar? Maybe the guy who cut you off in traffic is in an even bigger hurry than you. Empathy would seem to be logically connected to feeling less frustrated in these situations, but it turns out that it may be biologically connected as well.

To test stress reactions, Rodrigues blasted white noise into the ears of 192 UC Berkeley college students. The students got no warning for the first blast. Then, instructions on a TV screen told participants that the next blast would come after a countdown—this gets rid of the surprise but makes people stressed as they wait for the next sound blast. It’s called a “classic startle experiment.” Stress is measured by how much your heart rate goes up while you wait for the blast.

Rodrigues wanted to know whether there was any significant correlation between a rise in heart rate—how physically stressed a person got waiting for that white noise blast—and a variation in the gene that makes the oxytocin receptor. The participants were also asked to self-report on their stress levels. The hypothesis is that differences in the gene that makes the oxytocin receptor could affect the receptor, which could affect how oxytocin works, which could affect a person’s ability to cope with stress.