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A shout takes about one second. But in that one second, what is your body actually doing? Let's start with the brain. Deep inside it sits a tiny alarm. When you're angered or startled, it goes off first. The part that thinks things through and holds your tongue sits behind your forehead. It's the brake. The alarm is fast, and the brake often lags a beat behind.
Once the alarm sounds, the brain signals two small glands sitting on top of your kidneys. They release something into your blood: adrenaline. Your heart speeds up, and blood rushes to your arms and legs. You breathe faster, pulling in more air. Your eyes and ears grow sharper. Your body is ready: to fight, or to run. A shout is one way that surge finds its way out.
Where does the sound come from? In your throat are two small folds of tissue, your vocal cords. Your lungs push air up. The two folds flap open and shut, and the shaking air becomes sound. In everyday talk, they slap together a hundred to two hundred times every second. When you shout, your belly and chest squeeze hard. The air pushes up harder. The cords pull tighter and slam shut harder, so the sound gets louder and higher.
A shout has a surprising side effect. In one experiment, people squeezed a handle as hard as they could for two minutes. When they shouted while squeezing, their grip was about thirty percent stronger on average. The shout gives the brain a push: the part that drives your muscles fires up, and more strength gets through. No wonder, during tug-of-war or lifting something heavy, people can't help but yell.
And the person hearing it? A scream has a special roughness: its loudness flickers up and down dozens to over a hundred times a second. Normal speech rises and falls only four or five times a second. That rough sound sets off the alarm in the listener's brain too. In an argument, your alarm goes off, then mine does, and the brakes get even harder to hit. And after the shout? Slammed too hard, the vocal cords swell a little. Swollen, they can't close tightly, air leaks through, and your voice goes hoarse.
The adrenaline doesn't vanish right away either. Even after the anger fades, your heart keeps pounding for a while. So next time you feel a shout coming, you'll know it's the alarm ringing. Slowly, take a few deep breaths. That's how you help your brake catch up with the alarm.
An alarm in your brain goes off, and your whole body gears up. A shout is that surge bursting out of your throat.
Red is the "alarm" in your brain, orange is your racing heart, gold is the sound rushing out.
Put simply: the alarm rings first and the brake arrives later. The moment you want to yell is often the moment the brake hasn't caught up yet.
Your throat holds two small folds of tissue, the vocal cords. In everyday talk they flap open and shut a hundred to two hundred times a second. When you shout, they press tighter and hit harder.
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