Before getting into how people feel about their voices, one thing is clear: Our bodies make sure that our voices sound differently than they do in our heads. When we hear other people, soundwaves move through the air and then our tiny ear bones to create the electrical signals our brains interpret, explains Merel Maslowski, a psycholinguist at Royal Dutch Kentalis, a hearing and communication research organization in the Netherlands. Hearing ourselves requires a second process. The sound has to go out through our skull as we produce it before it moves through the air and our ears. “When we then hear our own voice played back from a recording, that sound is then only filtered through air, just like other people's voices, and so it sounds different from when we hear ourselves while speaking,” Maslowski writes via email. Maslowski’s research focuses on speech speed — how we perceive our own and others. Though she says she’s hesitant to speculate on why our voices might make us cringe, research has shown a deeper trove of evidence that people don’t listen to themselves the way they do other people. Measurements of electrical activity in the brain show that regions associated with attention were less active when people heard their own voices (and weren’t told ahead of time what they would be listening to). We also tend not to regard the acoustic cues in our own voices as informative as the cues in other people’s, Maslowski adds.