The 'Moist' Mind Virus: Why We Hate Wet Sounds
On misophonia and socially transmitted disgust
Welcome to The Ick, Season 4: DISGUST. This season I’ve invited a brilliant cast of writers and friends to explore what makes us recoil and why.
Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.
You may have read Jake’s amazing article about growing up with misophonia, and the difficulty with diagnosis. But how’s he coping these days? …
There is a man in my yoga class who burps. He is large, maybe 6’4”, mid-30s, soft. He is always the last one into class, and speaks in a European accent I can’t place.
I had heard him burp a few times before. I found it off-putting, but this is hot yoga, and 90 minutes in a 110° room does unpredictable things to the body. Anyway, after years of working abroad, I am well versed in the cultural relativism of manners, and told myself that burping during exercise might just be slightly more acceptable where he came from.
Then one day he placed his mat down next to mine, and midway into class I realized I had misunderstood the situation. Possibly this was not a cultural difference so much as a medical issue. The burps I’d previously heard—from the other side of the room—had only been the most audible. Now, two feet from him, sweat pooling onto our towels, I understood: the burping never stopped.
I estimate he burped 40 times in a 90 minute class. There was even this peak, a little staccato, where he got in three or four within 30 seconds, the absurd part being that he seemed to willfully choose a different mouth shape for each burp, creating this variety of tones, a do-re-mi of belching.
You can send all of the lovingkindness you want towards a person burping into your ear, and I did. I tried the CBT reframes, too: Maybe he’d just eaten. And had a Mountain Dew. But at one point I got annoyed enough that I turned sharply toward him, and he noticed the movement, our eyes met, and his pupils widened, like he only just then realized everyone else could hear him. A minute later he burped again.
I had lots of time to sit and observe my feelings towards this man, wondering to what extent it made sense for me to feel angry given that I was having a hard time conceiving of a world in which this wasn’t some sort of severe digestive issue. In such a situation, the hard part wasn’t even actually the burp so much as my anticipation of it: the anger and affront at the norm violation, the “is he really going to do that again?”
It’s a feeling I’m familiar with from having misophonia. I have always struggled being in proximity to the noises that people make with their mouths. But lying there, I realized: his burps weren’t actually activating my misophonia. This was garden variety disgust—different from a misophonic trigger.
Which made me then ask: What precisely is the emotional experience of misophonia? And why wasn’t I being bothered by burping?
Wet sounds
Science has been slow to understand misophonia. It took over 20 years for researchers to arrive at a consensus definition of the condition. Formally, it is now described as: “a disorder of decreased tolerance to specific sounds or their associated stimuli, or cues. These cues, known as ‘triggers,’ are experienced as unpleasant or distressing and tend to evoke strong negative emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses not seen in most other people.”
The definition is intentionally vague so as to be inclusive. Partly that’s because triggers vary widely. Chewing sounds are canonical. In one study, 83% of people who identified as having misophonia reported chewing sounds as their earliest trigger. This sometimes gets further broken down into subcategories: crunching, lip-smacking, teeth-sucking, slurping. Others are more bothered by nasal sounds, or breathing, or throat clearing. (Personally I think it should include the specific sound that’s made when people knock a piece of peppermint against their teeth.) A minority get triggered by tapping or repetitive sounds.
But triggers can be hyper-specific and idiosyncratic. Scroll over to Reddit and read about people who are triggered by flip flops, hard C and K sounds, and southern accents. May they avoid the coastal Carolinas.
The “strong negative emotional” response is more consistent. It is almost always described as either anger or disgust, or some combination thereof. (The consensus definition also includes “irritation” and “rage,” which are of a part.) Many people report panic and anxiety, but this seems to be secondary and evaluative—more about anticipation and whether they’ll be able to handle the situation in public.
I’d always taken the co-occurrence of anger and disgust for granted. I can point to times when I felt both; the anecdote which began a longer piece on misophonia—my dad eating steak—starts with one. But the phenomenology is hard to fully pin down, and at a certain point, the words people use to describe it descend into cliche: driving me insane, etc.
The more I thought about it, though, the stranger it seemed that disgust and anger would co-occur. Both are obviously negatively valenced, but what triggers them, what they make the body do, and the neural circuitry that supports them are quite different.
Most evolutionary typologies of emotions recognize disgust and anger as both universal and distinct. The psychologist Paul Ekman, after showing photographs of facial expressions to various cultures, identified six core emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust.1 Robert Plutchik, another psychologist, thought there were eight. (Plutchik put them into a wheel, arranged by opposites, separated by intensity. Not exactly scientifically validated, but descriptively useful, kind of like the Enneagram.)
I think subjective experience is much more nuanced than emotions on a wheel. Qualia is deeply layered. But microphenomology doesn’t lend itself to data, which is why so much misophonia research focuses on one emotion at a time. And when you ask misophonics to name the primary emotion they feel when they’re triggered, an interesting pattern emerges.
In a 2021 study, researchers took 828 people with misophonia and asked them to listen to different sounds. Some were specifically designed to elicit a wide misophonic response—teeth-sucking, loud chewing, gum smacking. Others were more neutral: yawning, clocks, a mobile phone. After listening to each sound, participants were asked to identify their primary emotional reaction: no feeling, irritation, distress, disgust, anger, panic, or other.
Some sounds predominantly evoked no feeling: yawning, sneezing, footsteps, hiccups. More than half of misophonics reported that yawning, footsteps, and certain letter sounds made them feel nothing at all. Panic and distress were also uncommon, save a few outliers—for some reason the sound of cutlery induced distress in 22% of people?
Looking at the middle column, you can clearly see that anger and irritation were far and away the most common primary reaction to the sounds. This is consistent with nearly all research.
But take a look at disgust. Using >20% of participants who named disgust their primary emotion, here are the most disgust-inducing sounds: teeth sucking (27%), slurping (29%), swallowing (23%), mushy foods (23%), and kissing (21%). For mushy foods specifically, disgust was even the most common response—before irritation (22%), anger (21%), no feeling (17%), and panic (5%). Slurping also induced nearly as much as anger—29% to 34%.
So disgust is almost never the primary response. But sounds that tend to evoke it all have one thing in common: they’re moist.
‘Moist’ as a social contagion
Moist is the pumpkin spice latté of word aversion. Ask a group of millennials what word they hate most and you will inevitably hear the word moist. A famous Facebook group, back when we joined Facebook groups, was called “I HATE the word MOIST!” It was a meme well before anyone talked about memes.
The moist mind virus became contagious enough to merit scientific attention. In 2016, Paul Thibodeau, formerly a psychology professor at Oberlin, attempted to quantify how far it had spread. In a series of five experiments run on Mechanical Turk, some 10-20% of people reported a strong aversion to the word moist. Compared to the non-averse, the moist-averse rated the word a full 25 points higher—around 50 on a scale of 100. To put that into perspective, 25 points was the average difference in the entire sample between “delicious” and “fuck.”
Moist-averse people also appeared to have a higher reactivity than the non-averse to semantically similar words: damp, wet, etc.—and to words related to bodily function: see the delta between the groups at phlegm. But: most people had some aversion to moist. Non-averse people scored it around 25 out of 100, putting the word roughly equidistant between “delicious” and “phlegm.”
The same study asked (other) participants to list the first word that came to mind on hearing the word moist, and almost 30% said something like “ew” or “gross.” Non-averse people just played a game of telephone and listed “wet” or “damp.” Curiously, when you asked people why they had an aversion to the word moist, they explained it had to do with the sound of the word—not its semantic meaning.
What Thibodeau really wanted to know was whether an aversion to the word “moist” could be socially transmitted. So he ran an experiment to induce an aversion to the word. One group watched a video of the world’s sexiest men—which in 2013 included Matt LeBlanc and Ed Sheeran—saying the word moist. This video was not originally designed to elicit an aversive response, but apparently the reaction to it when People put it out was so negative that Thibodeau felt he could use it as a proxy. (Just watch it.) The controls watched a group of actors describing a cake as moist. What happened?
Those who watched the cringey-video subsequently rated their aversion to the word moist twice as high as those who watched the cake.
Not knock-out proof: People took a survey later in the session, so they were obviously primed. But you can see, if you squint, how an aversion might start.
I’ve written, and Scott Alexander has written, about how you can think of misophonia as a trapped prior. Your brain forms a negative association with a specific sound. Each new exposure to the trigger sound gets interpreted through that lens, and the reinforcing loop is difficult to break.
One intermediate conclusion I think you can draw is that the aversion to the word moist that spread through the internet over the past 15 years is only partly mimetic. I think it’s actually a socially transmitted form of misophonia. Well before teenage girls were catching Tourette’s from TikTok, millennials gave each other misophonia for the word moist. (I don’t think most misophonia researchers would refute the idea that misophonia triggers can be considered contagious, even as it hasn’t been well-studied. Jane Gregory, a psychologist and misophonia researcher with the condition, describes how she thinks her husband has developed misophonia by being alert to her triggers.)
In misophonia, the association between trigger and response is typically made in adolescence—on average around age 13. Many misophonics can trace their triggers back to some early negative associations, e.g. you were a sensitive kid frequently scolded at the dinner table, perhaps for chewing with your mouth open. I think it shouldn’t be surprising then that a “moist” aversion could be a learned association that moves through social networks. Disgust (like most emotions) can probably be socially transmitted through mirror neurons, and misophonia can also be thought of as a conditioned response.
But, my hypothesis is that that transmission will be easier for some words than others, specifically words that already have some sort of aversive association. I think it would take a lot more work to condition a disgust response for the word “toast.”
Why we hate ‘wet’
Teeth-sucking, slurping, swallowing, and mushy foods all involve the sound of something wet—saliva, tongues, lips, or a food with high moisture content. And it seems that this, specifically, is the variable that reliably turns the primary emotional response of misophonia into disgust rather than anger.
This makes sense, I suppose. Revulsion to bodily fluids is a human universal. This is one of the more reliable findings in disgust literature. People find wet things grosser to touch. Wet stimuli—especially stimuli resembling “biological consistencies”—evoke more disgust than dry stimuli. One study even found that moisture consistencies between 33-39% evoked the most disgust.
I never noticed this pattern in myself until writing this. The actual experience of a misophonic trigger is complex and layered: an immediate register of annoyance, a bracing sensation through the body, a desire to leave the situation so strong it feels like reflex more than decision, and then the secondary appraisal of guilt. It’s hard to tell when and where disgust factors in.
But as I’ve been paying closer attention, I realize there are several foods that I find reliably discomfiting rather than annoying. One is bananas. I cannot explain this. I’m embarrassed even to say it. The act of eating a banana is barely even audible. But there is something about the extremely subtle squish within someone’s mouth that I find intolerable—and I appear not to be alone in this.
All of this suggests something that I don’t think gets discussed much in the misophonia literature, which is that the misophonia response is actually reliably bi-modal based on the trigger, toggling between anger and disgust depending on whether a sound reads as a norm violation (dry, crunchy) or a contamination risk (wet, mushy). Or, to put it into terms you, dear tpot reader, may better understand: dry foods and anger are kiki, moist foods and disgust are bouba.
Both anger and disgust can be considered as defensive emotions, but the difference is in the way they’re directed. Anger is fundamentally accusatory and confrontational. If someone is inconsiderate, violates a social contract, that needs to be corrected. Disgust is self-protective and inward-facing. It’s your body saying “I need to get away from this.”
Misophonia is learned. But that both disgust and anger can be reliable responses depending on the trigger suggests that the way the brain interprets the violation is more complex than pure conditioning or predictive processing: there’s a deeper, evolutionary component that intervenes. You may hold a prior that a given sound will be unpleasant and distressing, but the brain chooses, at least in some sense, how to feel in response.
This is a little forced, an artifact of choosing to focus on one emotion at a time, and I think it’s clear that most people experience some combination of both disgust and anger at any given time, or for any given person. Interestingly, if you go back to Plutchik’s emotion wheel, and look at what you get when you combine anger + disgust, it is “contempt.” I think that’s possibly a more accurate description of what misophonics feel on a day to day basis—although I suspect this is more semantic than scientific.
But let me also propose another explanation for why there’s at least some divide between anger and disgust: Misophonics are well aware that their condition makes no sense, and many are apologetic about it. It’s one thing to get angry at someone loudly eating kettle chips. But flying into a rage at the sound of yogurt seems like another level of absurd. So in addition to the wet<>disgust pathway, perhaps there’s a more top-down unconscious modulation of the misophonic response—that even for a misophonic it’s above and beyond to get angry at oatmeal.
As for my friend who looked, sounded, and behaved like an extra on Game of Thrones: why didn’t he trigger my misophonia, just my quotidian politeness expectations? Scroll back up to the graph that featured the responses to different sounds, and you’ll see that yawning, sneezing, and hiccups—all relatively involuntary—tended to cause less negative responses. None of these are considered as impolite as burping, but my expectation is that if it was tested, it would fall somewhere in between yawning and loud chewing.
Moreover, my own experience with misophonia has changed significantly over time. The triggers haven’t lessened, but the space between trigger and response feels much larger. Part of this is that I’ve developed what I’d call a meta-awareness of the absurdity of my own predicament, the cosmic joke of whatever karma got me here, such that I’ve learned not to associate the shudder that runs through my body as my own. But I suspect, next time I go back, it might actually be a little worse: misophonia is learned, after all, and maybe I was just in the window of grace in which that association has yet to be neurally cemented.
Perhaps, though, that grace was something else entirely. If you buy Plutchik’s theory, you cannot simultaneously feel two emotions that are arranged opposite from each other. What’s the opposite of disgust and loathing? Acceptance, trust, and admiration. Which, you have to hand it to him: 40 burps is impressive.
Jake Eaton is the managing editor of Asterisk Magazine and author of Anzalogue.
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Uggh, the moist sounds! It is very hard to have compassion at a silent retreat with all that breathing! Or mindful eating? Forget it. I am curious what you mean about “misophonia is learned?”. I only realized it was a thing when my son developed it at 11. I’m also pretty sure my father had it. I thought it was an inherited neurological condition.
I find it interesting that my misophonia of slurping or other eating sounds is confined to humans. My dogs or any dogs that I hear making eating noises I have no problem with and even enjoy.