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How Seeing Can Trump Listening, Mapped In the Brain
cortex writes "University of Utah bioengineers discovered our understanding of language may depend more heavily on vision than previously thought: under the right conditions, what you see can override what you hear. In an article published in PLOS One, 'Seeing Is Believing: Neural Representations of Visual Stimuli in Human Auditory Cortex Correlate with Illusory Auditory Perceptions,' the authors showed that visual stimuli can influence neural signals in the auditory processing part of the brain and change what a person hears. In this study patients were shown videos of an auditory illusion called the McGurk Effect while electrical recordings were made from the surface of the cerebral cortex."
... and there are always trade offs.
Of course there are going to be bugs, especially for a process that is mostly driven by blind forces. I'd be more interested to see how often in natural settings these systems work properly and/or are beneficial. Instead of engineering unnatural input to find flaws/bugs or sometimes just to mock our wetware and say "See our brains work poorly".
Ever happen to be looking for a street in an unknown area, and you end up turning down your radio? This actually increases your visual acuity slightly even though many may question your sanity when doing it. Many blind people have increased auditory capacity, and this has been known for a very long time. It doesn't seem all that far fetched that one (or more) of those senses could override the other. Maybe that meal that you hate tastes absolutely amazing...but looks so terrible that you taste it differently.
I think the Donald only listens to other right-wing conspiracy nutters
Why can't the woman shutup for 10 seconds so I can concentrate on the effect she keeps prattling on about? It makes it difficult to study when her voice is over top of the illusion half the time.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
After googling for the McGurk Effect and watching a bunch of videos I have concluded that I can't really sense this effect at all. I'll take their word that most people can.
Probably what is more interesting is some of the info on Wikipedia about the sorts of things that make the effect more or less pronounced. I'd be interested in the results for the average Slashdotter - I suspect that things like mild autism are much more common here.
A 20Gb sensory connection having more power than a 20mb connection? Who would have thought that making sense of the world depends on having the most data possible?
And conversely, when an advertiser has to tell you the bad news about their product, the visuals crank up/switch to something compelling so you won't register the bad news.
I come here for the love
One picture, one thousand words, who'd a thunk it?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HReySt8AMmI
Nice to see a new generation learning things I studied in school 20 years ago. No, this isn't news, but y'all are children so it's all good.
I can't listen, either..
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There was an article a few days ago about software to create the illusion of eye contact with video calls. As some people pointed out, continuous eye contact is actually somewhat disconcerting. When I'm listening to someone, I tend to watch their lips, particularly in high background noise environments.
Have gnu, will travel.
When I'm joking around with a friend, and I say something like "ahh go fuck yourself" and I'm smiling, they take it by my facial expression that I'm kidding around and not by my language which could otherwise be construed as insulting.
I never would have thought that people would fall for the visual appeal of something rather than listen to what is actually being said!
Next breaking news: Vanity results in bad decision making.
How can he physically produce the "Baa" sound when his bottom lip is tucked behind his teeth? His lips don't press together when the illusion is supposed to make it sound like he's saying "Faa" instead. I think he's actually making two different sounds.
Isn't the "Baa" sound impossible to make without the lips pressing together? Isn't the "Faa" sound impossible to make without blowing on the lip-teeth connection with the top and bottom lips separate?
There was a supposedly entertaining example of this on one of the astronomy blogs a while back, but they got a takedown notice before I saw it. Changed what you heard in a music video, IIRC. Does anyone know where we can find that?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It reminds me of this:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583974-top-musicians-are-judged-much-their-movements-their-melodies
In short, people were bad at guessing who won the competition when they could only hear the music and not see the performers. Professional judges were just as bad as novices (worse when they could see the performance but just as bad when they could only hear it).
Interesting stuff.
University of Utah bioengineers discovered our understanding of language may depend more heavily on vision than previously thought
If understanding of [spoken] language depended on vision, blind people wouldn't be able to understand it.
And the McGurk effect is nothing new. It was first described by Mr McGurk and Mr McDonals in 1976.
THIS article finally confirms my suspicion that it is a normal response within some individuals to easily perceive light in an auditory fashion. Perhaps this is why mood lighting is so effective and disco balls were such a hit though they are essentially useless.
All though this explanation from some scientists defies this logic, I have been with other people in the pitch dark watching the lights at the same time and they did not hear the sounds I was experiencing and the sound was not at all as described in the article on Space. The sounds that happen to me are definitely like an electrical spark crackling not at all like applause!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
They "discovered" that? I remember a demonstration of this in a phonetics class, which I took in like 2002. Though my guess is that it's only the summary that's wrong, and the researchers themselves didn't claim to "discover" anything, but were simply doing new neurological research on the effect, given that the summary itself mentions the McGurk effect. Quoth Wikipedia, "The McGurk effect is sometimes called the McGurk-MacDonald effect. It was first described in 1976 in a paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald entitled 'Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices'."