Want to shut someone up? Check out the latest invention from Japan…

Ever wish you could just shut someone up at the touch of a button? Well, soon you’ll be able to do just that thanks to some Japanese researchers.

The Daily Mail reports that researchers in Japan have invented a machine that can literally stop conversation dead in its tracks. Simply  point the ‘Speech Jammer’ at the object of your aural annoyance and watch as they lapse into silence. Amazing.

Apparently the machine forces individuals into ‘vocal submission’ which sounds pretty cool, but also oddly painful. Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada are the masterminds behind this odd invention and they claim that the Speech Jammer is accurate when fired from up to 30 metres away.

So how does it work exactly? The machine is basically like a gun, which, when shot at someone who is speaking at you, stresses them into silence by freezing their brain…eh…okay…

The gun works by picking up speech with a special microphone, and after 0.2 of a second, it fires the same noise back to the person who initially said it. This technique is called ‘Delayed Auditory Feedback’ and is apparently guaranteed to interrupt your speech and make you fall silent.

It sounds a bit unbelievable, but psychologists have said that when we speak, our brains need to hear what we say but it is unsettling and debilitating to hear it twice. When the sound is fired back at us, it completely confuses us and makes us forget what we were saying.

According to its creators the Speech Jammer will not cause the person any physical pain but it will freak them out enough to shut up. Result!

“In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds,” said researchers.

Boss giving out to you? Wife nagging you to do something? Kids wrecking your head? Maybe you should invest in one of these…