Hot on the heels of the Yanny/Laurel audio illusion, many people shared other illusions that are just as weird and fun.
The McGurk effect pairs different mouth movements with speech, and you tend to hear different things with different mouth movements.
In this video, you hear the word for whatever object is on the screen (bill, mayo, pail) even though the audio doesn’t change:
And in this one, whichever word you focus on, “green needle” or “brainstorm”, that’s what you hear:
What all of these effects demonstrate is that there are (at least) two parts to hearing something. First, there’s the mechanical process of waves moving through the air into the ear canal, which triggers a physical chain reaction involving the ear drum, three tiny bones, and cochlear fluids. But then the brain has to interpret the signal coming from the ear and, as the examples above show, it has a lot of power in determining what is heard.
My kids and I listen to music in the car quite often (here’s our playlist, suggestions welcome) and when Daft Punk’s Get Lucky comes on, my son swears up and down that he hears the mondegreen “up all Mexican lucky” instead of “up all night to get lucky”. If I concentrate really hard, I can hear “Mexican lucky” but mostly my brain knows what the “right” lyric is…as does his brain, but it’s far more convinced of his version.
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