From menacing hisses to blood-curdling screams, sound of Aztec Death Whistle It’s as creepy as the skull-like appearance of the instrument that produces it.
Brain scans have shown that whistling sounds can do more than create a scary atmosphere. Swiss and Norwegian researchers discovered h.Listening activates a variety of higher-order centers in our brains, hinting at a complexity of sound that can only be described as a startling mix of the natural and the eerily unfamiliar.
It is no surprise that the Aztecs used them to enhance their religious and sacrificial rituals.
Rumor has it that Mesoamerican civilizations also used disturbing sounds to scare their enemies during war. That became controversial. This is because no whistles were found at battle sites or warrior graves.
Neuroscientist Sascha Frühholz and colleagues at the University of Zurich recruited 70 European volunteers for psychoacoustic testing of their personal interpretations of randomly selected sounds, including creepy whistling sounds. Volunteers were not given prior warning that skull whistle sounds would be included, so expectations were removed before rating each recording.
Thirty-two of the participants listened to a death whistle among a random mix of sounds from five categories while having their brains scanned with an fMRI.
Most volunteers compared it to the sound of a whistle. scream.
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“We show that skull whistle sounds are primarily perceived as disgusting and scary and have mixed natural and artificial origins,” the team said. establish.
Researchers explain that this strange mix of natural and artificial makes it difficult for our brains to categorize, like the uncanny valley effect in the form of sound. The uncanny valley similarly occurs when our brains cannot clearly define whether what it is seeing is natural or artificial.
Our brains use classification to first categorize sensory input before assigning it a value, such as likeability. But when something doesn’t fall into a clear category, that ambiguity makes us anxious.
Hearing a whistle activated lower auditory cortex areas of the volunteers’ brains. This area is tuned to aversive sounds, such as screams or crying babies.d Instructs the brain to analyze stimuli at a deeper level.
“Skeleton whistles… are somewhat ambiguous in determining the source of the sound, which enhances higher-order brain processing,” the researchers say. write In their paper.
Compared to other test sounds, Some sounds are made by humans and animals, but others include sounds made by nature, music, and tools. In particular, skull whistles activated the inferior frontal cortex, which deals with elaborate categorization processing, and the medial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in associative processing.
When all sounds were compared, the sounds made by death whistles were categorized into groups closer to alarm sounds, such as horns, sirens, and firearms, and noises closer to human fear, pain, anger, and sad voices.
Many versions of this whistle have been found in tombs dating back to between 1250 and 1521 AD. Some of them were associated with ritual burials. Considering these points and their results, Frühholz and the team suspect that the whistle may have been designed to symbolize: EhecatlAztec god of the wind.
“[Ehecatl] “Traveled to the underworld to obtain bones from previous eras in order to create humanity.” explain.
Or, the spine-chilling sound of skull whistling may have symbolized a sharp wind. MictlanAztec underworld.
“Given the aversive/frightening, evocative/symbolic nature of the sound and the excavation sites of ritual burials with currently known human sacrifices, it appears to have a very high potential for use in ritual contexts, particularly in sacrificial rituals and rituals involving the dead.” says Frühholz and team finish.
This study communication psychology.
