Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vocabam, and today's episode is another classic from our erstwhile host, Christian Sager. He's here to explain why we're all weirded out by the sound of our own voice. Hi, I'm Christian Sager and welcome to brain Stuff. Have you ever heard a recording of yourself played back and thought? Why do I sound like that? It happens to me
every time I listen to this podcast. It is weird, right, Usually our voices sound deeper, but when played back the way everyone else hears them, they're higher and tenure. Why does it sound so different and why do we hate it so much? Well, the sound of your voice reaches your inner ear in two different ways. The vocal folds in your throat vibrate, creating sound waves that travel through the air, But those sound vibrations also conduct through your body,
particularly through your skull and bones. Our skulls lower the frequency of these later vibrations as they bounce around inside our throat, mouth, and neck before reaching the ears cochlea through the fleshy tissue in our heads. The surrounding bones spread out the vibrations lower their pitch and enhance the lower frequency vibrations, so your voice sounds fuller and deeper. When we hear our voice played back on a recording,
we don't get it filtered through flesh and bone. What we're hearing, then, is only the air conducted sound of our voice as waves of pressure. These vibrations are caught by our outer ears and then transmitted through our ear drums, where they vibrate three bony ousticles before reaching the cochlea. In both cases, the cochlea converts these vibrations into impulses that are sent to the brain. But with the elimination of the bone conducted sound, we end up hearing our
voice the way everyone else hears it. Most of us have had this experience, and we hate it. We're used to the combination of the air conducted and bone conducted sounds of our voice. It's what we've lived with all of our lives, so of course it's unsettling to hear something so different than what we're used to. But remember this, This is how your friends have been hearing you your
whole life. To them, it is normal. So just relax and rest easy, knowing that everyone cringes at the sound of their own voice, even Morgan Freeman, well, everyone except Morgan Freeman. Today's episode was written by Christian and produced by Tyler. Playing for more wellness and lots of other topics that will shake you to the bone, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.