I'm going to debunk you because as your business partner, I get to constantly annoy you with you loud eating, and this way you have an excuse for being mad.
It's not just the fact that they see a response in AIC that highlights the important aspect of this research, but rather the dissociation between sound evoked activity in controls vs misophonics. While control subjects found unpleasant sounds as annoying as the misophonics found trigger sounds, activity in AIC increased only in the misophonics, and only for the trigger sounds. Interesting to see also that for misophonics, AIC activation scales linearly with the degree of distress - I'm assuming this wasn't the case for unpleasant sounds (but I'm not positive and didn't read closely enough to tell).
You say it's not clear that it's a product of the way their brains are wired, but in the paper they highlight a potential for greater myelination in vmPFC in misophonics. They do this indirectly citing differences in magnetization transfer saturation. I don't know this technique, so I can't really comment on how legit it is, but it seems at least there's some effort to attribute this to structural rather than purely functional differences.
And yeah, of course it's always possible that it's some other factor that is underlying these effects, but I think this dissociation shows reasonably convincing evidence for pursuing more research on this condition (e.g., diffusion imaging to better understand potential structural differences)
It's not just the fact that they see a response in AIC that highlights the important aspect of this research, but rather the dissociation between sound evoked activity in controls vs misophonics. While control subjects found unpleasant sounds as annoying as the misophonics found trigger sounds, activity in AIC increased only in the misophonics, and only for the trigger sounds. Interesting to see also that for misophonics, AIC activation scales linearly with the degree of distress - I'm assuming this wasn't the case for unpleasant sounds (but I'm not positive and didn't read closely enough to tell).
You say it's not clear that it's a product of the way their brains are wired, but in the paper they highlight a potential for greater myelination in vmPFC in misophonics. They do this indirectly citing differences in magnetization transfer saturation. I don't know this technique, so I can't really comment on how legit it is, but it seems at least there's some effort to attribute this to structural rather than purely functional differences.
And yeah, of course it's always possible that it's some other factor that is underlying these effects, but I think this dissociation shows reasonably convincing evidence for pursuing more research on this condition (e.g., diffusion imaging to better understand potential structural differences)