Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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Misophonia

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Almost any sound can set off instant aggravation in an individual that a clinician might diagnose as “misophonia.”

Even everyday sounds can cause negative reactions. Sometimes we are the transmitters of audible noise that, while routine, others find obnoxious. A sound can take a listener to the far side of annoyance, creating irritation or the urge to move on. The popular press is full of accounts of individuals who can’t stand to be around certain people because of their loud chewing, endless pen-clicking, throat-clearing, or vocal tics that function like aural red flags. For example, silence-fillers such as “like” or “you know” are nonfluencies that can make it less likely that someone will hear anything else. In theory, almost any sound can set off instant aggravation in an individual that a clinician might diagnose as “misophonia,” the name given to their discomfort with certain everyday sonics.

Humans are generally a noisy lot.

There is no shortage of ways we easily fall into repetitive routines that have their own sound signatures. The person with misophonia who is obsessing over the same auditable triggers is frequently–if accidentally–matched up to an obsessive producer of them. Part of the fun of Neil Simon’s classic play, The Odd Couple (filmed in 1968), is how Felix’s oral tics begin to grate on the laid-back Oscar. Endless throat-clearing is a typical case. Neither of the divorced men sharing an apartment has made a match that is any better than their failed marriages. The annoyances are funny because they would be recognized by any couple living under the same roof.

Imagine the intentional baiting of a sound-sensitive person with the very things that annoy them most. It happens, often as a kind of rhetorical strategy that can be described as a “deliberate misidentification.” The human default in social relations is usually to meet someone halfway: to find common points of identification. By contrast, the intention to annoy is a break from our best selves, a misidentification and a passive-aggressive behavior that provokes someone seen as a deserving victim. For some in the mood for some mischief it may be a barking dog let loose in a backyard as “payback” to a complaining neighbor, or perhaps a music system cranked up to answer the circus of noise that never ceases next door.

It turns out that there is no shortage of online videos and articles on how to fight back against noisy neighbors. It is especially common in buildings housing many families. Audio engineer Brett Houston “solved” the problem of lead feet incessantly moving around in the apartment upstairs. His solution was to put loudspeakers in the ceiling cavities that he had inadvertently opened after pounding on them once too often using the old apartment dweller’s recourse of a broomstick jabbed into the thin drywall. In the hole Houston placed a large speaker between the joists under the neighbor’s floor. He then put microphones at different points along the ceiling, routing the sound through an amplifier, with a short delay. He then fed the sounds back to the speaker under the neighbor’s floor at a 1 to 3 ratio. The “karma” he sought meant that any noise they made was amplified and fed back to them three times.  The neighbors eventually moved.

About that Slippery Ramp. . .

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The explanations that kept multiplying affirmed what so many believe about the President: that he is preoccupied by the wrong things.

Recently President Trump was photographed leaving a graduation event at West Point gingerly descending a long ramp.  And, as everyone knows, he looked a lot like our grandfathers teetering along a sidewalk after a bad ice storm.

Social media had a field day with the images. Trump’s baby steps made the oversized man with an even larger ego look uncharacteristically frail.  And it created a lesson about what a perfect presidential response could be.

In American society it is almost never permissible to use age as a reason for any limitation. There is shame in accepting that we’ve been changed by time. Most public figures would laugh off the incident with grace, perhaps acknowledging (if they did at all) that ramps without rails can be slippery.  (The sloping walkway in fact had a rough-surface grip on its surface about every two feet.)

End of story. . . but not quite.

In his defense, he was probably right to mention that hard leather shoes can act like deflon on a smooth painted surface.

End of story . . . but not quite.

Two perfect responses down.  Any more begins to be less, including over ten minutes of defensiveness at his political rally in Tulsa. This vaudeville act was a grotesque overreaction from a President of the United States, given the medical, financial and social crises wracking the country.

End of story . . . but not quite.

He again addressed the same moment at West Point with the press in a later meeting.

Given the nation’s crippling problems, none of this really matters as substance.  But it does signal a character problem.  Many in their seventies may know the health costs of falling and breaking a hip can be far-reaching and even life-threatening. He had two reasonable explanations for caution.  That was enough. His continued reference to the event reminded us that the appearance of frailty mattered too much. It fed the widespread view that the President’s rhetoric only makes sense to him if it involves self praise and a blustery persona more appropriate to professional wrestling than political leadership.  So the explanations that turned into too many began to reaffirm what so many believe about the President: that he is more concerned about appearances than substance. And when protests of innocence boomerang, they end up as affirmations through denial, communicating to almost everyone that a person has lost awareness of what he is signaling.