Take a listen.
What you just heard is the most awful sound in the world, according to new research.
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience and conducted by researchers at Newcastle University, involved exposing 13 study participants to 74 different sounds while they were being scanned by an MRI, ABC News reported.
The sound of a knife being screeched against a glass bottle was the most excruciating sound the study participants were exposed to, according to their findings.
The second? The sound of a fork being scratched on a glass. That was followed by the screeching sound of chalk on a chalkboard, the sound of a ruler on a bottle, and the sound of nails on a chalkboard, The Telegraph reported. (To hear those sounds, click over to The Telegraph.)
In general, the noises that were found to be terrible all had frequencies of 2,000 Hz to 5,000 Hz, Yahoo! News pointed out.
But what is it about the way our brains process these sounds that make them so unbearable?
"It appears there is something very primitive kicking in. It's a possible distress signal from the amygdala to the auditory cortex," study researcher Dr. Sukhbinder Kumar, of Newcastle University, told Medical Daily.
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