Have you ever been faced with a loud talker in a restaurant that wouldn't shut up? Don't you wish you had some sort of gun that could silence the noise? That is to say, something other than an actual gun?

According to the MIT Technology Review, a pair of Japanese researchers have the solution for you: a speech jamming gun.

The idea is simple: apparently, it's a well-known psychological fact that it's nearly impossible to speak when your own words are played back to you at a delay of a fraction of a second. My phone does this some times, and I can vouch for its effectiveness.

So Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University developed a simple handheld device that records someone’s voice and plays it back to them at a delay of .02 seconds, enough to drive anyone crazy. The whole apparatus works directionally, so that it can be aimed at an offending talker from a moderate distance. It also causes no physical pain.

The gun is most effective against reading aloud and less so against "spontaneous monologue," and note that it's useless against random strings of noises.

The researchers cite conflict resolution and discussion as the main uses for their device, but woe to the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology commencement speaker this year.

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