I was intrigued this morning when I heard a clip on the radio, but the explanation put forward for what was happening blew my mind.
If you haven't tried this yet, give it a go.
What do you hear when you listen to this clip?
An Audio Illusion
The back-story to this viral sensation begins with a teenager Katie Hetzel at a high school in Georgia studying for a literature assignment. She looked up the word Laurel on vocabulary.com and was surprised to hear Yanny when she played the audio clip. She asked her classmates and they heard mixed things, so she posted it to her instagram and from there the clip went viral. The particular clip heard by Katie was recorded for vocabulary.com by an opera singer in New York. When this site first started they wanted to use people with strong pronunciation, and who could read words written in the international phonetic alphabet. They hired a bunch of opera singers to record over 200,000 words for the site.
Everyone's world is just a little bit different...
What you hear, see, smell, taste are sensory inputs and they are interpreted by your brain sometimes in different ways.
Why did Katie hear Yanny?
One explanation is that what you hear is based on many factors including your age. Younger people hear lower frequencies better than older people.
The Human Brain
The story of Yanny or Laurel is incredible in some respects but if it was just down to the mechanical reason that younger people hear different frequencies it would not be as remarkable. What really captured my attention this morning was the explanation put forth by a Valerie Hazan, Professor of Speech Sciences at UCL.
The speech signal is ambiguous, people are primed to get Yanny or Laurel, then our ear and brain is trying to make a best fit to this ambiguous sound. Our brain is trying to make sense of it, and honing in on one set of frequencies; Laurel or Yanny….
Your brain makes an assessment of what you hear and assigns a match partially based on context, prior knowledge, external stimulus etc.
The particular recording for this word is a bit ambiguous and very close to the two words technically depending on what frequencies your brain hones in on.
Your brain makes a decision, a best estimate of what it hears.
Think of this for a second
...
Your brain evaluates the information that is before it, then makes a decision on the outcome, the result of this decision is what you get to hear.
It is just like a machine learning algorithm, but there are differences between our brain and a computer.
We hear what we want to hear...
What blew my mind this morning was the fact that our brain works just like a computer yet it doesn't always get it right, or even consistent. People see different things, hear different things and even the same person can perceive different outcomes depending on their situation.
Emotion ...
Our brain is influenced by external factors such as being primed to hear one word or the other, but our brain also uses Emotion to help it make a decision. Nassim Taleb describes this in his book Fooled by Randomness. He describes the function of decision making in the brain as necessitating emotion. Emotions provide a shortcut to the brain to help it make a decision. If we were to weigh up the pros and cons of every decision we may never get out of bed in the morning!
Our brain is much more complex than a machine learning algorithm but it has some incredible similarities. I think the rise of the machines is still a long way off!
What do you hear?
References
https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history/
https://rte.ie/r.html?rii=b9_21367839_48_17-05-2018_
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.
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