I am Scott and I'm Then and we're from car Stuff. We're the podcast that covers everything that floats, flies, swims, or drives, adventures, thrills, chills literally, planes, trains and automobiles. That's right, And you can find all of our episodes on Google Play, Spotify, iTunes, and really anywhere else you get your podcast. Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hi, I'm Christian Sager and welcome to brain Stuff. Have you ever heard of 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 owned, 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. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.