Furtherman
11-18-2010, 01:52 PM
This is amazing. Watch the video, and your brain will do the rest.
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The McGurk effect is a powerful illusion where our brains hear the wrong noise if they're presented with visual evidence that something else is being said. Now we've discovered what part of the brain is behind this strange effect.
We've already talked about optical illusions, but this auditory illusion might be even freakier. Let's say you record a person pronouncing a couple sounds over and over again - say, "bah" and "vah", which are very similar sounds made with clearly different lip movements. Now you keep the audio of the person saying "bah" but overlay it with the video of the person saying "vah." Which sound will you hear?
Any sane person would think you'd still hear "bah", but that isn't the case at all. The mind prioritizes the visual information over the auditory information, deciding what it sees as the correct noise - the person mouthing "vah" - trumps the ears clearly hearing the person say "bah." You can literally watch the mixed video, clearly hear the person say "vah", then close your eyes and it immediately switches back to "bah", and the only change in sounds occurred entirely in your mind. That's the McGurk effect.
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The McGurk effect is a powerful illusion where our brains hear the wrong noise if they're presented with visual evidence that something else is being said. Now we've discovered what part of the brain is behind this strange effect.
We've already talked about optical illusions, but this auditory illusion might be even freakier. Let's say you record a person pronouncing a couple sounds over and over again - say, "bah" and "vah", which are very similar sounds made with clearly different lip movements. Now you keep the audio of the person saying "bah" but overlay it with the video of the person saying "vah." Which sound will you hear?
Any sane person would think you'd still hear "bah", but that isn't the case at all. The mind prioritizes the visual information over the auditory information, deciding what it sees as the correct noise - the person mouthing "vah" - trumps the ears clearly hearing the person say "bah." You can literally watch the mixed video, clearly hear the person say "vah", then close your eyes and it immediately switches back to "bah", and the only change in sounds occurred entirely in your mind. That's the McGurk effect.