Why We Scream
October 28, 2026
Every October, our neighborhood turns into the grounds of a nineteenth-century asylum, strange creatures waving or menacing, taped recordings with bloodcurdling screams (or maybe that was me). Screams register sudden terror—but are themselves unnerving. They should not be; they are our first sound. Our first bit of self-expression, our first response to the world. Shoved from the cozy dark, sensing cold metal and fluorescent light, we scream our heads off, outraged to be born. Or maybe we have a psychic’s hunch about the varied terrors that await us.
Luckily, an infant’s wail, though it pierce the nerves, does not chill the bones the way an older-voiced scream will. Still, why not just give a casual gurgle? How do we even know to scream? The difference comes with the force of the air—and the force of feeling behind it. In shock at this rude tugging and snipping and slapping, newborns scream their need for the big humans’ attention.
“The essence of a scream is a declaration,” notes Michael Seidlinger. We scream to be heard. If we fell, alone in a forest? At the most, we might moan. But screams aim to communicate, recruit, or manipulate. You cannot argue with a scream. Nor can you ignore one.
Seidlinger’s compressed, vivid book-length essay is simply titled scream. The sound renders other words superfluous. “In each scream,” he remarks, “there is still an uncanny openness. There’s a realization: A scream doesn’t require the language we have so cleverly used to communicate. All it needs is an emotional core. A deeply emotional and scared kid, I had nothing but an emotional core.”
Too sensitive and too anxious for comfort, he found a homeopathic remedy, soaking up horror movies and games. “Becoming the characters in those games as they ran around in an all-encompassing fight-or-flight, adrenaline surging through hours of zombie attacks and demon kills—it was practice.”
Now, as a smarter and tougher adult, he understands exactly what was happening. “Horror movie screams are trojan horses of deception, the sort that once heard, you can never again unhear. It triggers the amygdala, engaging our internal fight-or-flight response.” (Incidentally, that response is no longer such a stark choice; researchers have identified an alternative “tend and befriend” response said to be more common in women. But I have never wanted to befriend anything that came with a scream.)
Young Seidlinger also became a lifelong metalhead, lacing his musical pleasure with the banshee wails of Slipknot, et alia. By the rest of his family, “the screams were thought to be unnecessary, anxiety-inducing, and outright horrible,” he recalls. “But to me, it was euphoric.”
Here we have the fight instead of the flight; screams conflated not with terror but with rage. Where did his own rage come from? He sounds far too gentle to wish anyone harm. Was the anger a form of fear?
“Maybe it was due to the stifling feeling that came from the knowledge that I couldn’t face what others so easily did,” he muses. Then he digs deeper, writing that “the anger was more likely from the inability to feel like myself around others, less a person and more a shapeshifting shell of anxiety.”
That phrase reminds me of Edvard Munch, who would cringe to see his most famous painting on all those refrigerator magnets. But The Scream speaks to us. Its wild colors and exaggerated form capture a primal terror one cannot express in polite society. AI could kill us in the next ten years? Brows furrow, chins are stroked. But what we are feeling inside….
Munch painted that scream long before the chatbots rose up; in 1893, to be precise. The world was changing too fast even then. Nerves were frayed, souls choked with dread. Munch felt it, too. On a sunset walk along Ekebergåsen, he was gazing at the Oslo Fjord when the sky, without warning, turned blood red. He had a bit of a panic attack. Then he painted what he had felt.
We do not usually scream at the sunset. We scream in haunted houses and at political protests and when the referee makes a bad call. So far I have managed to avoid ever screaming, hysterical, at someone I loved. But the nightmares that still unsettle me, years later, are the ones where someone is chasing me or trying to get into my front door—and I scream—at least I try to—and no sound comes out. The terror shifts from imminent danger to my own powerlessness, which is actually something altogether different.
I would rather be screaming on a roller coaster. Those screams are never stifled; they are involuntary reflexes, releasing the tension that built as the car ratcheted up that fake mountain. Now you are plummeting, going faster and faster, leaving your stomach a little higher than it ought to be with the rest of you falling. You curve around a bend that ought to defy physics, then drop again, and your body cannot stanch the flood of adrenaline and cortisol. But dopamine and endorphins are in the mix, too, and your scream is as exuberant as it is terrified. Plus, screaming prevents you from holding your breath and fainting. It also engages your core, which stabilizes you against the jolts, and it releases nervous energy the way an orgasm might.
Besides, everybody else is screaming too. You are part of the pack, a willing recipient of emotional contagion, and as you stumble off the ride, you will trade happy or, with age, rueful grins. The experience was artificial, cheerfully manipulative. No Siberian tigers stalked, waiting to pounce and eat you.
“Screams likely originally functioned to startle attacking predators,” Jay Schwartz of Emory University told Seidlinger. Schwartz’s research team wondered how we can distinguish, effortlessly and accurately, between an incredibly loud voice and a scream. He found the same response in every single study volunteer: they were reacting to the sound’s pitch, a measure that tells us how fast the vocal folds were vibrating. The higher the pitch, the more likely it was that you were hearing a scream.
David Poeppel, who runs a speech and processing lab at NYU, disagrees. Pitch does not fully explain our instant understanding of a scream, he says, and neither does volume. Instead, his team “found that screams occupy a reserved chunk of the auditory spectrum.” That chunk was “rough,” which is how experts describe “the rapidity of the sound as it changes in decibels,” causing distortion. Harsh sounds fall between 40 and 80 Hz, and the swiftness of rasp and reverberation is registered by the amygdala, hippocampus, and insula. In other words, by the brain structures related to pain and aversion.
Pain scares us. Destruction and loss scare us. But what scares us most is ceasing to feel anything at all.
“Screams call to us,” Seidlinger concludes, “signaling that someone, somewhere, is afraid of the end, just like us. A scream is a reminder of the unknown, not too distant from the greatest unknown of all: death itself.”
I recognize the truth of this the next time I walk the neighborhood. There are skeletons. Zombies. Bloody severed heads and limbs. Spirits cut loose from flesh.
Our homeopathic remedy.
