In the field of behavioral psychology, the phenomenon known as “confirmation bias” tells us people see what they want to see. But it goes well beyond physical descriptions. Yet, it’s as though one group measures in feet and gallons while another measures meters and liters. In the real world, though, it’s much easier to measure things. That’s a strange land where we freely admit we don’t know all the rules. How could divergent views simultaneously exist despite there being only one common set of data points? One might accept this “duality” in the sub-atomic world. Let’s refer to the human’s brains – that awful place where all people’s brains exist at the same time. If this duality of competing realities can co-exist in the hard sciences, imagine the conflict that can be conjured up in the land of make believe (otherwise known as the human brain). They both couldn’t be right… or could they? (Spoiler alert: they were both right.) Another experiment proved light behaved like waves. One experiment proved light acted like particles. Scientists designed experiments to prove (or disprove) the competing hypothesis. One side argued light consisted of particles, the other side maintained light was made up of waves. A century ago a major debate mired the field of quantum physics. He didn’t say, “Listen to this and tell me whether you hear “Laurel” or “Yanni.” He specifically said he wouldn’t tell us what the options were because that could influence what we believe we heard. Before playing the sound for Betsy and me, Peter was careful to avoid asking us which one we would hear. That is, whether you hear “Laurel” or “Yanni” depends on what you mentally prepare yourself to hear. This personalized bioware phenomenon leads to the fascinating tidbit revealed by Laurel/Yanni. Just as the hardware can modify sounds at the surface level, our own “bioware” can change the sounds within us. Sometimes we can do this on purpose, sometimes this is a function of age. It turns out, we have the ability to focus our hearing on different frequency ranges. This explains part of Laurel/Yanni.Īt a deeper level, though, we have the fascinating world of fine tuning frequencies. Think of this as the difference between listening to the same song on AM radio vs. At the surface level, different devices (recorders, speakers, amplifiers) can alter the original sound. blue/black dress” debate from 2015.įirst, the science behind Laurel/Yanni. Some people (like Peter) can hear either one, depending on what they’re listening for.Īnd therein lies the critical lesson of this latest internet sensation, the audio version of the visual “white/gold vs. In the case of the Laurel/Yanni audio illusion, listeners convince themselves the string of sounds says “Laurel” or “Yanni.” Although the sound is the same, different people hear different things.
You hear what you want (or expect) to hear. In an identical way, an audio illusion contains one string of sounds. What you see depends entirely on what you’re looking for.
With optical illusions, the same drawing reveals two completely different pictures. You use your eyes with optical illusions and your ears with audio illusions. This was the now famous “Laurel/Yanni” audio illusion.Īn audio illusion is like an optical illusion. A few days before it went viral, Peter asked Betsy and me to listen to something and tell him what we heard.
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