Body

in a 2025 study looking at auditory discomfort and Misophonia, propose sparse encoding as a potential underlying mechanism for sensory discomfort. Computational models suggest that the brain encodes sensory input efficiently using sparse coding, in which only a small subset of neurons are active at a given time; when visual stimuli cannot be encoded sparsely, neural activity increases, and discomfort may arise as a homeostatic response to metabolically costly stimulation. They suggest a similar account for auditory discomfort, whereby certain sounds may resist sparse encoding and produce excessive neural activation. Although this explanation is most consistent with cortical processing, strong pitch sensitivity raises the possibility that earlier auditory structures, such as the cochlea or brainstem, may also contribute; notably, while research on musical roughness and consonance links auditory nerve activity to perceived pleasantness, sparse coding models have also successfully characterized processing in early auditory regions, including the brainstem and inferior colliculus. Understanding how encoding breaks down during uncomfortable auditory stimulation may therefore clarify the shared neural basis of auditory and visual discomfort (Haigh et al., 2025)