Joe Palca - Annoying

If the woman on the treadmill next to you in the gym is having an interminable call with her boyfriend, you could try focusing on something else. “There is only me and the stationary bike. I am one with the stationary bike. I hear nothing but the whirring of the gears. I sense nothing but the pumping of my blood.” That might work.

You could take the Zinedine Zidane approach and head-butt the person on the cell phone—that might make you feel better, until you get arrested. Maybe just thinking about doing it will help ease your irritation.

Or you could adopt the attitude of the Ifaluk islanders and simply accept the annoyance, realize that it’s an inherent component of the social milieu in which you find yourself, and move on. You could try that.

You could try all of those things, but based on our extensive research, none of these strategies works that well. They might make you feel better momentarily, but the things that bug us do so in a way that transcends reason. You know that your reaction to this minor unpleasantness is out of proportion, yet you can’t help but get annoyed. And once you’re annoyed about being annoyed, it’s all over. This is terminal annoyance.

So, as a last-ditch effort, remember that bad feelings—on the whole—usually aren’t so bad. They signal that something is wrong, which throws into relief that things usually aren’t. If overhearing an annoying halfalogue is your biggest problem, buy some earplugs and be thankful.

Long acknowledgments are annoying. Brace yourself.

We are grateful for the many people who took the time to talk with us during this project. You can see their names scattered throughout this book. We would particularly like to thank Robert Hogan and Paul Connolly for their help with developing a scientifically credibly annoyingness test; Linda Bartoshuk for her interest in scaling annoyingness; Carol Tavris for her helpful suggestions; Chris Joyce, Sarah Brookhart, Janet Zipser, Corey Dean, Erik Tarloff, Sandy Blakeslee, Alta Charo, and Michael Lemonick for contributing stories about what annoyed them; and Sarah Varney for her wonderful research on cultural annoyances.

F. L. is grateful for the mentorship and generous support of Ira Flatow, her boss at Science Friday , and the intelligent guidance of Annette Heist, the show’s senior producer. J. P. thanks his NPR editors Alison Richards and Anne Gudenkauf for their support. He also would like to thank NPR president Vivian Schiller for her enthusiasm about this project.

We also gratefully acknowledge the encouragement and support of our agent, Jim Levine, and his colleagues and staff at Levine Greenberg.

This book would never have happened without Eric Nelson, our editor at Wiley. A few years ago, he e-mailed J. P. out of the blue asking if he’d like to write a book. “No,” J. P. replied without a moment’s hesitation. Eric evidently had a better crystal ball on his desk than J. P. did.

That brings us to a paragraph that’s hard to write in the third person, so Joe will take it from here. This book was Flora’s idea. People who know me have trouble believing that, because for some reason, most of my coworkers, friends, and certainly my immediate family believe that I have more practical knowledge about how to be annoying than anyone they’ve ever met. But Flora has had many interesting, provocative, clever ideas in the time that I’ve known her, and this book was one of them. She was kind enough to let me write it with her.

Many friends deserve thanks for their interest and positive feedback: Doris Palca, Soji Adeyi, Gaby Newes-Adeyi, Claire Wyman, Roland Kanaar, Bob O’Rourke, and Kim Darnell.

I was lucky enough to have two splendid fellowships while this book was being planned and written. I was science writer in residence for six months at the Huntington Library and Botanical Garden, where I was able to pester the staff with annoying questions. Special thanks to Huntington president Steve Koblik (who I think has finally forgiven me for failing to catch an egregious spelling error when I “proof read” one of his books), Dan Lewis, Roy Ritchie, Susan Turner-Lowe, and most especially Laurie Sowd.

The other fellowship was as a visiting media scholar at the Hoover Institution, where I spent an extremely productive week on probably the most unusual project ever pursued at that institution. Thanks to Henry Miller, Mandy MacCalla, and David Brady.

I would like to thank my children, Sam and Jacob, for putting up with their annoying father, and my wife, Kathy Hudson, who had an unconventional but nonetheless effective way of helping me write this book. I’m extremely grateful for her love.

absolute pitch

allergens, social

Altman, Neil

amae (Japanese emotion)

Americans

annoyances

annoying behaviors to other cultures

pace of life

time perception

amnesia

amplitude envelope

amygdala

Anderson, Alun

Anderson, Karen

anger

annoyances

biological processes

brain processes in healthy people

bugs as

categories of

cell phones

coping with

cultural differences

definition of

in dreams

evolutionary theory

genetic factors

“good annoyance”-utility tradeoff

hedonic reversal theory

Huntington’s patients

measurement of

of mice

“out of order” things and situations

philosopher’s account

primate studies

in relationships

research issues

smells

social rule breaking

stress and

trash talk in sports

See also noise annoyances

Annoy-a-tron

anterior cingulate cortex

antidepressants

Aoyagi, Mark

Aron, Arthur

Aronson, Elliot

arrogance

Association of Japanese Private Railways

autism

aversion

Balents, Leon

Bartoshuk, Linda

basal ganglia

baseball “Bug Game”

bed bugs

benign masochism

Blake, Randolph

bleeps and blips

Block, Eric

Bloom, Paul

bonobos

brain

Huntington’s disease deterioration

limbic system’s role in annoyance processing

research

Brazil, pace of life in

Briggs, Jean

Brookhart, Sarah

Brosnan, Sarah

bugs

capuchins

cars

Carstens, Earl

cell phones

cerebral cortex

Chabris, Christopher

chalkboard, fingernails-on- sound

Chamberlain, Joba

Chapman, Hanah

Chemical and Engineering News

chemical ecology

Chemical Educator

chemical nociception

children

chili peppers

chimpanzees

China, plagiarism in

cingulate cortex

cingulotomy

Cleveland Indians, “Bug Game”

cochlea

cognitive restructuring

Cohen, Ron

collectivist cultures

colorblindness

Columbus, Christopher

Conmy, Benjamin

Connolly, Paul

consonance

context

conversations, on cell phones

Conway, W. B.

cortex

Cox, Trevor

Craig, Kevin

Craufurd, David

cultural differences

Eskimos

eye contact

Ifaluk inhabitants

Japan

personal space

plagiarism

time perceptions

Cunningham, Michael

Current Biology

Curtain, Michelle

Damasio, Antonio

Danneman, Peggy

Darwin, Charles

decay

Denlinger, David

Denson, Tom

desensitization theory

de Sousa, Ronald

disgust

dissonance

dorsal anterior cingulate cortex

Dragoo, Jerry

dreams

Dreyfuss, Richard

drug therapies, Huntington’s patients

ears. See also sounds