Joe Palca: Annoying

“English, by contrast, is a very highly stressed or inflected language,” says Huron. “We have weak and strong syllables. It’s speech that keeps whacking you over the head, slapping you in the ear. That’s related to the experience of roughness. To the French, the classic description of English is that it sounds like a fly buzzing around your head.”

As cars become more sound-proof and pedestrians stop up their ears with headphones and cell phones, siren companies are looking for new ways to be heard. Meet the Rumbler. It’s the big gun. It doesn’t operate like traditional sirens. “It’s an auxiliary device, to be used in conjunction with the standard siren products,” says Paul Gergets, the director of engineering for mobile systems at Federal Signal, the company that makes the Rumbler. You wouldn’t turn on the Rumbler if you were simply responding to a call. It’s for tough situations. It’s for when the usual sirens don’t move people.

You guessed it—the Rumbler’s claim to fame is that it rumbles. From the grill of the vehicle, it shoots out a low-frequency sound that is meant to be felt more than heard. Federal Signal describes it this way: “This system provides penetrating/vibrating low-frequency sound waves that allow vehicle operators and nearby pedestrians to feel the sound.”

Think of what happens when you’re stopped at a red light in front of a car blasting its bass. It shakes the windows and the rear-view mirror. The Rumbler is made to do this to the cars around it.

The Rumbler was born from a request by the Florida Highway Patrol, which was having trouble getting people to move out of the way. The patrol was looking for “a different type of siren tone for instances where they were not getting the attention of people with their standard sirens,” says Gergets. “With the regular siren you’re competing against stereos, quiet car environments, cell phones, et cetera, and the Rumbler gives you an alternative method for getting someone’s attention.”

Getting people’s attention isn’t merely a matter of getting to an emergency more quickly. Sirens protect EMS personnel as well. “I almost get killed one in three times I’m in this thing,” Dale says, pointing at a white sedan he drives, which doesn’t look much like an emergency vehicle until he revs up the sirens and flicks on the lights. The car is also outfitted with a Rumbler.

You can now find the Rumber installed in police cars across the country, but not everyone likes it. Some are complaining that the Rumbler is frankly too annoying. NoiseOff—“The coalition against noise pollution”—points out on one of its fliers: “The siren can be heard and felt from a distance up to 200 feet away. It easily penetrates into nearby homes and apartments even with windows closed… . Its use presents a new form of urban blight where residents are made captive to intense low frequency noise.”

This complaint gets to the paradox of good annoyances. Most people would probably agree that a little annoyance from sirens is a small price to pay to live in a society where people can get medical care quickly. Good annoyances are fragile, however—make them a little more annoying and they’re no longer good. They’re simply annoying.

Imagine a graph with “utility” on one axis and “annoyance” on the other. If you plot something in the high-annoyance, low-utility quadrant, most people would say, “No, thanks.” Low annoyance, high utility? “Yes, please.” Yet finding the tipping point often isn’t a straightforward calculation. Besides, we don’t all agree on what’s pleasant and what’s unpleasant, and sometimes we can’t even decide whether one thing is irritating or irresistible.

Shortly after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, the famous explorer noticed something curious. The natives he encountered tended to cook their food with a spice that Columbus thought tasted terrible. Not only did it taste bad, it set their mouths on fire. Columbus was astounded that people willingly ate this stuff. “All the people will not eat without it, considering it very salutary,” he wrote in his diary on January 15, 1493. {7} 7 1. Christopher Columbus, The Journal: Account of the First Voyage and Discovery of the Indies, trans. Marc A. Beckwith and Luciano F. Farina (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1992).

The spice was chili pepper. If Columbus was surprised that it was popular with the denizens of the New World in 1493, he’d probably be shocked to learn that the chili pepper has only grown in popularity during the last five centuries. It’s estimated that one-third of the planet’s population eats chili pepper in one form or another each day.

Why do people enjoy eating something that at least initially tastes bad and even causes pain? And what’s this got to do with annoyingness? Good questions, says Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. With his help, we’ll tackle the chili-eating conundrum first.

Rozin likes to study quirky topics. He has devoted much of his career in psychology to discovering why certain things disgust people. He’s also interested in the flip side of that: why other things are attractive. His interest in the popularity of chili pepper began in the 1970s.

If you want to study annoyingness, you have to spend a lot of time learning about mildly objectionable things, and chili peppers are right on the border between pleasant and unpleasant. When we describe a food as delicious, we usually mean something that everyone would like. We can all agree that a certain restaurant’s french fries are great or an ice cream shop’s sundaes are sublime. By contrast, one person’s deliciously spicy burrito could be positively inedible to his friends. If you want to figure out what makes something unpleasant, chili peppers are an interesting test case.

Rozin says that there’s no question that eating chili peppers is an innately negative experience. “We have all kinds of evidence that little children don’t like this taste.” In some chili-eating cultures, women rub chili powder on their breasts to speed up the weaning process.

There’s a lot of conjecture about why people started to eat chilies in the first place, because evidence has shown that they’ve been part of the human diet for approximately nine thousand years. Some ethnopharmacologists (yes, there is such a discipline—the field even has its own journal) have suggested that the Maya ate peppers for their antimicrobial properties. {8} 8 2. R. H. Cichewicz and P. A. Thorpe, “The Antimicrobial Properties of Chile Peppers (Capsicum Species) and Their Uses in Mayan Medicine,” Journal of Ethnopharmacolgy 52(2) (June 1996): 61–70. More recently, scientists in Canada have shown that despite their potential for setting the lining of your esophagus and stomach on fire, chilies contain a chemical that suppresses the gut bacteria Helicobacter pylori . {9} 9 3. N. L. Jones, S. Shabib, and P. M. Sherman, “Capsaicin as an Inhibitor of the Growth of the Gastric Pathogen Helicobacter Pylori,” FEMS Microbiology Letters 146(2) (January 15, 1997): 223–227. That’s a good thing, because H. pylori is the bacterium associated with gastric ulcers.

Are people eating chili peppers for their health, then? “I’m not convinced of it,” says Rozin. The evidence is circumstantial at best. Presumably, ancient cultures were unaware that the Nobel Prize would be awarded in 2005 for the discovery of the relationship between H. pylori and ulcers.

There are other theories about pepper’s popularity. “There’s the idea that it disguises decay,” says Rozin. “People were eating food without refrigerators, and they put this thing on, and they wouldn’t notice decay. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense.”