Lunch at the Marriott hotel in Mesa, Arizona, was southwestern style: a buffet tray of overcooked chicken breasts and soggy enchiladas. I had recently made the acquaintance of a friendly man in his late thirties with a shaved head and a pale oblong face named Paul Tabachneck, and we navigated the lines for food and utensils, then sat down at a lunch table together to eat our meal. Tabachneck, I noticed, ate carefully, eyes trained either on his own plate or a single spot on the beige walls. But his conversation was lively. He was telling me about busking as a guitarist in the New York subway while trying to achieve a lifelong dream of becoming a professional musician. And then, when we’d been talking for about ten minutes, I scraped my knife against the plate trying to cut the dry chicken. Tabachneck whipped his head around to look at me, his eyes suddenly cold.

“Did you have to do that?” he snapped. “And did you know that your jaw pops when you eat?”

We’re all annoyed by annoying sounds: fingernails on chalkboards, car alarms, Gilbert Gottfried’s screech. But some people are more than merely annoyed—certain sounds can send them into an agonized frenzy. There’s the journalist from Atlanta who wanted to reach across the dinner table to strangle his loudly chewing father; the computer scientist from Arizona who hated the sound of knives so much his girlfriend developed a phobia, too; the housewife from Oregon who moved her whole family out of her home so she wouldn’t have to listen to them. One teen couldn’t stand the sound of her mother sighing and, after going on anti-depressants, attempted suicide three times. Psychologists have begun to call them misophones—people with an acute reaction to specific, usually low-volume sounds. But because the condition is still poorly understood, sufferers struggle to convince their families, friends, and employers that their problem isn’t just a heightened form of neuroticism. In this hotel, however, where the first-ever scientific conference on misophonia was being held, tales of extreme aural agony were pouring forth, and sufferers who thought they were alone in their misery were finally meeting others of their kind. You just had to be very, very careful with your cutlery.

When Tabachneck was 14, he and his father were watching a movie together in their living room in Pittsburgh; Tabachneck’s dad started pushing all his ice-cream melt together into a puddle, repeatedly clinking his spoon against the bowl.

Up to that point in his life, Tabachneck’s relationship with sound had been normal. He loved music, enjoyed the sound of laughter. He found sirens and the trains that passed within earshot of his bedroom to be somewhat grating. But this clinking was something different—it provoked a combination of anxiety and nearly physical agitation that he couldn’t ignore. “Are you done with that yet?” he remembers shrieking at his father. It was the beginning of a lifetime of noise-related misery.