What's Up with All These Viral Illusions?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/whats-up-with-all-these-viral-illusions/560693/?single_page=true

76 29 8 years ago

warent• 8 years ago

The "Brainstorm / Green Needle" illusion is a huge mindfuck.

I especially loved this line, because it's the exact question I immediately thought:

Am I experiencing a hundred micro-yannys and laurels every day without knowing it? Joe Toscano, who studies auditory perception at Villanova University, couldn’t answer that question, perhaps because he, like everyone, is trapped in the prison of his own mind

dwaltrip• 8 years ago

It seems to me these illusions are a very small, tangible peek at the extensive differences in how people perceive the world around them.

fenwick67• 8 years ago

Call me a buzzkill but I'm not impressed with this, things are misheard all the time, especially when you feed them through rough PCM sampling and then make a recording of it.

gowld2• 8 years ago

Even if I called you a "buzzkill", you might hear it as "fussyear".

xamuel• 8 years ago

A much earlier example (showing the phenomenon isn't so new) is the famous "Cranberry Sauce"/"I buried Paul" vocal at the end of The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" (1967). It became one of the key ingredients in the fun "Paul is Dead" conspiracy/joke.

8ytecoder• 8 years ago

I have an accent and when people repeat what they think they heard I'm usually blown away. It's totally not what I said at all. I repeat what I said to a friend and they'd understand it perfectly well because they are now used to my accent. So the researcher and the article are wrong in that sense. Our brain absolutely fills in the gap and a slight change in accent will throw it off balance.

B1FF_PSUVM• 8 years ago

I've seen that in action. It's not only the accent, word choice also matters. Non-native speaker says something unusual, native speaker hears the nearest idiomatic phrase for the situation.

Brains make up a lot of stuff, not to mention the filtering already done before the signals travel there.

pen2l• 8 years ago

I hear "Green Needle" 100% of the times if listening with headphones, I hear "Brainstorm" 100% times if listening with iphone X speakers.

toufka• 8 years ago

Similarly, if you ever get immersed into a language that you only know a little of, you soon realize your brain is way too good* at filling what it mis-hears or doesn't understand.

* And the real lesson is that it's good at feeling like it's understanding, even if it's understanding very little.

AznHisoka• 8 years ago

Is that why I always hear “O Christmas” at the beginning of every anime?

cdetrio• 8 years ago

The "Bill bale pale mayo" video is my second favorite after this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JATjMZJuX1c

yerry• 8 years ago

The twitter version of the yanny/laurel audio clip is severely distorted, and the original audio from vocabulary.com is not. [0,1]

Given this fact, the whole thing is twitter click bait, over almost nothing at all. One may as well argue over the correct spelling of “yanny” and whether it should have two N’s or not.

[0] https://twitter.com/CloeCouture/status/996218489831473152

[1] https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel

gowld2• 8 years ago

I hear only slight distortion (higher frequency) in the Twitter. I assumed distortion/mishearing came from people using crappy speakers.

Anyway, I'm far more interested in how this Cloe person ran their ad-buying/"influencing" campaign to draw attention to this nothingburger that she/they are now trying to sell merchandise from.

Izkata2• 8 years ago

Whatever the distortion is, I at least year "yanny" on Twitter and "laurel" on vocabulary.com (and haven't been able to make either one switch however I focus)

zaroth• 8 years ago

Hear it both ways: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-...

Izkata2• 8 years ago

We're amazing at pattern matching. This has been known for ages visually, with optical illusions and art (^_—), but I guess technology has caught up enough to make auditory illusions much easier to create/capture/spread than ever before.

whatshisface• 8 years ago

What color is a tennis ball? Her subsequent investigation revealed yet another nexus of fierce division over what our senses tell us about the world we live in. Some said green; Roger Federer said yellow, and Marina concluded: “The color of a tennis ball is, and would remain, in the eye of the beholder.”

This isn't remotely comparable to the rest of the illusions, because it's not an illusion. People were asked to choose between yellow and green to describe something that is, spectrally, about halfway between the two words. Everyone is seeing the same color (unlike the dress), but they're choosing different words to describe it.

hammock3• 8 years ago

How is that different from yanny/Laurel?

cujo• 8 years ago

Everyone is seeing the same color (unlike the dress), but they're choosing different words to describe it.

Everyone isn't hearing the same word.

choxi• 8 years ago

Think about the gold/white and blue/black dress. It's not as if one person thought the dress was blue and another thought it was more of a turquoise. Gold/white and blue/black are distinctly different colors and are nowhere near each other on the color spectrum. This wouldn't have gone viral if some people heard "Lauren" and others heard "Laura", what's amazing is that "Laurel" and "Yanny" are phonetically distinct but somehow different people perceive different sounds.

If you find this interesting, I recommend checking out the Radio Lab episode on "Colors". They go as far as speculating that ancient cultures perceived fewer colors than we do, because colors like "blue" aren't common in the natural world so we never learned to "tune into" the visual stimuli that tell us something is blue until we started to create more blue things.

IIAOPSW• 8 years ago

I'll bite.

Here's whats up with all the illusions. I wrote in a previous comment that things go viral when each person exposed to a piece of content (sound, image, whatever) on average exposes it to more than one person. To steal from one of the replies I got, information virality can be understood in the same terms of biological virality Eg the SIR model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...

The answer to the question "why is X viral" comes down to "why do people feel compelled to share this". Optical/auditory illusions hit the sweet spot of causing universal disagreement without the disagreement falling along the tired lines of politics, demographics, and other pre-existing tribial lines. The disagreement is both universal and palatable.

What do two people do when they have a friendly disagreement? They seek a third opinion. And then the losing side seeks out two more opinions to prove their not crazy. Bam! virality. Eventually it gets to the point where random strangers on the subway are showing you their phone and asking what color is the dress.

bitwize• 8 years ago

His lab will often create micro-versions of these kind of illusions for their research—putting an ambiguous sound in front of “ark,” for example, such that it might sound like “bark” or “park.” Then, if people are primed with images of a dog, say, they’ll be more likely to interpret it as “bark.”

There was a Flash animation from about 2001 done as a tribute to MAME. It is set to the tune of Irene Cara singing the theme to "Fame"; and every time the word "fame" is sung, the MAME logo is flashed on the screen. Given the low quality of Flash audio during those days, our ears wwre tricked and we all heard Irene Cara sing "MAME".

Too• 8 years ago

An interesting take on this these illusions is that they also highlight the difficulties of machine learning. An AI might classify the sound as 100% sure it heard laurel, while another human is 100% sure he heard yanny. As both humans and AI have been proven to make such mistakes now, who would you trust? Can we trust AI to take decisions on its own?

What's Up with All These Viral Illusions?

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