Books: All About the Invidious Irritants That Irk Individuals

You get every bit as annoyed as I do by car alarms that never stop, fingernails screeching down blackboards, and a fly buzzing around your head. The prolonged whining of a child, your own or somebody else’s, drives you crazy.

In other words, some annoyances are particular to the individual, some are universal to the species, and some, like the fly, appear to torture all mammals. If ever there was a subject for scientists to pursue for clues to why we are who we are, this is the one.

And yet, as Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman make clear in their immensely entertaining survey, there are still more questions than answers in both the study of what annoys people and the closely related discipline of what makes people annoying.

Mr. Palca and Ms. Lichtman — he is a science correspondent for National Public Radio and she an editor for the network’s “Science Friday” program — skitter all over the map in pursuit of their subject, and at first their progress seems peculiarly random, like one of those robotic vacuums. But in the end they do indeed cover every part of the terrain: from physics and psychology to aesthetics, genetics and even treatment for the miserably, terminally annoyed.

Formulating a good working definition of annoyance is a persistent challenge for researchers. One calls it the weakest form of anger, simply diluted rage. Others cite overtones of disgust (a persistently belching dinner guest), dislike (a concert of atonal music) and even panic (that visceral “get me out of here” reaction to the fingernail on the board).

Still, a few constants emerge. An annoyance is unpleasant. It follows a pattern, but unpredictably so. It will definitely end at some point, but you don’t know when. Finally, it is neither harmful nor dangerous in itself, but it often channels something that is.

In sum, it barges into your brain and takes over. If it is a sound, it occupies enough of your attention to interfere with other thoughts. If it is a situation, it keeps you from where you want to be (the recipe calls for two eggs and you have only one). And if it is a person who is late (again!), it manages to do both.

Because so many annoyances are auditory, sounds are particularly well studied. Sometimes the context creates the problem, like the “halfalogue” of an overheard cellphone conversation: Our brains can tune out a whole conversation but seem programmed to pay attention to half. Sometimes the annoyance is the sound itself. One research group found that midrange frequencies, somewhere between a boom and a shriek, annoyed people more than either extreme. Reaction to sound may be cultural, but then again it may not be: Even members of an isolated African tribe appeared bothered by dissonant music.

Sometimes sound is meant by nature to annoy, like a baby’s wail. One researcher suggested that the fingernail on the blackboard bothers us because our primitive midbrain hears in it a primate’s warning cry.

And sometimes the problem lies more in the ear than the sound. People with perfect pitch report they are routinely driven insane by nebulous halftones that don’t fit into their ordered brains.

Mr. Palca and Ms. Lichtman have a lot of fun with the other large repository of annoyances: our fellow humans. Is there a prototype for the innately annoying person, that car alarm on two legs? Needless to say, there are many.

There are the people who display “uncouth habits, inconsiderate acts and intrusive behaviors” — we are annoyed by those who violate our social norms. Then there are the infinite variations on the unfortunate personality. First on a list of traits that tend to annoy others, interestingly, is that of being constantly annoyed. Then come arrogant and picky.

What about your own personal irritant, the spouse who was so enchanting during courtship and is exactly the opposite now? Studies show that precisely those traits that once attracted often begin to repel. Once he was cool; now he is cold. Once she was adoring; now she smothers. Here the problem seems to be a matter of dose.

People who are annoyed to the point of irritable and beyond might head for a medical evaluation; some neurologic diseases start like this well before other symptoms surface. For these patients antidepressants often work miracles.

For other sufferers, alas, there are few quick fixes. And so when you begin to kick my chair, I could try to pretend that I am Japanese, for it seems that the Asian ideal of subjugation of the self to the group makes for less annoyance with one’s neighbor. I could try to change my expectation that when peacefully seated I will not be jiggled like a fishing line, for it seems that among laboratory monkeys thwarted expectations are a prime source of annoyance. Or I can just turn around and glare at you and tell you to cut it out. Then I will be happy. And you will be annoyed.

 

Books: All About the Invidious Irritants That Irk Individuals

You get every bit as annoyed as I do by car alarms that never stop, fingernails screeching down blackboards, and a fly buzzing around your head. The prolonged whining of a child, your own or somebody else’s, drives you crazy.

In other words, some annoyances are particular to the individual, some are universal to the species, and some, like the fly, appear to torture all mammals. If ever there was a subject for scientists to pursue for clues to why we are who we are, this is the one.

And yet, as Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman make clear in their immensely entertaining survey, there are still more questions than answers in both the study of what annoys people and the closely related discipline of what makes people annoying.

Mr. Palca and Ms. Lichtman — he is a science correspondent for National Public Radio and she an editor for the network’s “Science Friday” program — skitter all over the map in pursuit of their subject, and at first their progress seems peculiarly random, like one of those robotic vacuums. But in the end they do indeed cover every part of the terrain: from physics and psychology to aesthetics, genetics and even treatment for the miserably, terminally annoyed.

Formulating a good working definition of annoyance is a persistent challenge for researchers. One calls it the weakest form of anger, simply diluted rage. Others cite overtones of disgust (a persistently belching dinner guest), dislike (a concert of atonal music) and even panic (that visceral “get me out of here” reaction to the fingernail on the board).

Still, a few constants emerge. An annoyance is unpleasant. It follows a pattern, but unpredictably so. It will definitely end at some point, but you don’t know when. Finally, it is neither harmful nor dangerous in itself, but it often channels something that is.

In sum, it barges into your brain and takes over. If it is a sound, it occupies enough of your attention to interfere with other thoughts. If it is a situation, it keeps you from where you want to be (the recipe calls for two eggs and you have only one). And if it is a person who is late (again!), it manages to do both.

Because so many annoyances are auditory, sounds are particularly well studied. Sometimes the context creates the problem, like the “halfalogue” of an overheard cellphone conversation: Our brains can tune out a whole conversation but seem programmed to pay attention to half. Sometimes the annoyance is the sound itself. One research group found that midrange frequencies, somewhere between a boom and a shriek, annoyed people more than either extreme. Reaction to sound may be cultural, but then again it may not be: Even members of an isolated African tribe appeared bothered by dissonant music.

Sometimes sound is meant by nature to annoy, like a baby’s wail. One researcher suggested that the fingernail on the blackboard bothers us because our primitive midbrain hears in it a primate’s warning cry.

And sometimes the problem lies more in the ear than the sound. People with perfect pitch report they are routinely driven insane by nebulous halftones that don’t fit into their ordered brains.

Mr. Palca and Ms. Lichtman have a lot of fun with the other large repository of annoyances: our fellow humans. Is there a prototype for the innately annoying person, that car alarm on two legs? Needless to say, there are many.

There are the people who display “uncouth habits, inconsiderate acts and intrusive behaviors” — we are annoyed by those who violate our social norms. Then there are the infinite variations on the unfortunate personality. First on a list of traits that tend to annoy others, interestingly, is that of being constantly annoyed. Then come arrogant and picky.

What about your own personal irritant, the spouse who was so enchanting during courtship and is exactly the opposite now? Studies show that precisely those traits that once attracted often begin to repel. Once he was cool; now he is cold. Once she was adoring; now she smothers. Here the problem seems to be a matter of dose.

People who are annoyed to the point of irritable and beyond might head for a medical evaluation; some neurologic diseases start like this well before other symptoms surface. For these patients antidepressants often work miracles.

For other sufferers, alas, there are few quick fixes. And so when you begin to kick my chair, I could try to pretend that I am Japanese, for it seems that the Asian ideal of subjugation of the self to the group makes for less annoyance with one’s neighbor. I could try to change my expectation that when peacefully seated I will not be jiggled like a fishing line, for it seems that among laboratory monkeys thwarted expectations are a prime source of annoyance. Or I can just turn around and glare at you and tell you to cut it out. Then I will be happy. And you will be annoyed.

 

Books: Defending Vaccination Once Again, With Feeling

Or so I thought before opening Seth Mnookin’s new book. Barely a dozen pages in, I began to reconsider, and by the end I had completely changed my mind: Mr. Mnookin’s passionate defense of vaccination may be just what the public needs, in equal parts because of what it says and because of who is saying it.

Mr. Mnookin is no expert in the field — at least he wasn’t when he entered the fray. Neither a doctor nor a scientist, he has no vested interest in upholding the medical status quo (thus avoiding an accusation regularly flung at vaccine proponents). He hails instead from what might be called, sadly enough, exactly the opposite demographic: he is young and hip, got a good liberal arts education, lives in an upscale enclave and works in another, as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. He is the father of a young child.

And it is people of precisely this description who are slowly picking apart the safety net that protected their own childhoods, prompted by a well-intentioned mixture of arrogance, ignorance and confusion.

It is not that these parents buy into some of the more lurid accusations out there, like the one floated by a British doctor that all pediatric vaccinations cause some degree of neurologic damage. It is more that the parents are alarmed by the hubbub and prefer to play it safe — but wind up defining “safe” in exactly the wrong way. In some communities nonvaccination rates have hit the double digits — well into the danger zone.

Expert opinion seems to have oddly little influence over these parents, but perhaps an analysis by a peer, rather than an expert, will change some minds. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Mr. Mnookin has put it all together in a readable narrative encompassing celebrity high jinks worthy of Vanity Fair at its snarkiest.

But those come at the end. Mr. Mnookin doggedly begins at the very beginning, with the first vaccine consisting of fresh smallpox pus. Subsequent vaccines were refined, first with the use of less dangerous germs and then with noninfectious germ fragments. The first great triumph of mass vaccination, the Salk polio vaccine, made its debut in 1954, promptly followed by the first great vaccine-associated disaster: a sloppily made batch that paralyzed several dozen children in California.

One shudders to think of the fallout from such an event today, but back in the ’50s parents were still familiar with the toll of childhood diseases, and vaccine momentum barely stumbled. Now, Mr. Mnookin reflects, cases of vaccine-preventable disease have become so uncommon that in 2003 one desperately ill infant (too young to be vaccinated) managed to cough the unmistakable “whoop” of whooping cough in the faces of dozens of baffled medical professionals before the disease was correctly diagnosed — too late to save her life.

Autism, meanwhile, was first named during World War II, and since then rates have skyrocketed. The first to claim a vaccine-autism link was a British physician named Andrew Wakefield, in a small study published in 1998. Dr. Wakefield ultimately lost his medical license for a variety of misbehaviors, and this flagship study, under investigation for years, was formally discredited several months ago.

Dr. Wakefield held that measles virus from the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine spread through the intestinal tracts of vulnerable children and then caused brain damage. Meanwhile, separate speculation focused on the mercury-based preservative thimerosal (used not in the M.M.R. but in other vaccines up until 2003); the idea here was that toxic mercury levels damaged the brain. Neither notion has stood up to careful analysis, and studies have repeatedly failed to confirm any clear association between these vaccinations and autism.

Mr. Mnookin traces out all these separate threads (with the footnotes of a true scholar), even venturing away from the tangle long enough to explain how scientists are trained to think about causation and how profoundly this measured approach is bound to infuriate a distraught parent with a suddenly altered child.

But he really hits his stride when he turns to the social history of autism advocacy; his section on the actress Jenny McCarthy is a tour de force. To promote her 2007 book describing the purported vaccine-induced autism of her young son and his subsequent cure, Ms. McCarthy staged a media blitz, a medical tent show writ large. Blond and charismatic, she waved away the science, energized the people who wanted to believe her message (the not inconsiderable “I feel, therefore it is” segment of our society, as Mr. Mnookin puts it) and managed to do quite nicely for herself as well, netting a deal with Oprah Winfrey’s production company.

I suspect that it was never among Mr. Mnookin’s goals in life to become the de facto sparring partner of such an individual, but this book sealed his fate, and he has acquitted himself nobly. Parents who want to play it safe, but are not altogether sure how, should turn with relief to this reasoned, logical and comprehensive analysis of the facts.