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Illusions for Your Ears

By Gregon

New Scientist currently have a special issue on music, with a number of features freely available online to feast on. One of those pages is on auditory illusions, and I’ve heard good things about #2, “Phantom Words”. I say ‘heard’ not to pun, but because I didn’t get any illusions…whereas others have told me they heard complete phrases. However, it sounds (in theory) like an interesting example of how our brains can hear voices (quite separately from the whole microwave thing discussed earlier this week). Are the ‘skills’ of mediums somehow related to this, or are they separate. Anyhow, if you hear illusory words or phrases, post a comment and let me know what you got.

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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7 Comments

  3. mmmm
    Since I’m mexican, what I kept hearing was bueno (good), and no, güey! —which is auditory simmilar to ‘no way’, but has a COMPLETELY different meaning! 🙂

    —–
    It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
    It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

    Red Pill Junkie

  4. One not on the list
    Not strictly an auditory illusion, but one that included auditory (non-)stimuli:

    In an experiment I was running, we had either a repeating tone (a lower note) or an occasional odd tone (a higher note), presented once per second. They were to pay attention to the sounds and press a button to the odd tone. To make sure they paid close attention we lied and told them the button press was a reaction time test. We also occasionally had a flash on a video screen by itself with no note. They were to ignore these.

    After running the stimuli I asked several questions, including one that had nothing to do with the study: “Could you tell when the flash was going to happen?

    About 1/3 of the subject reported they could predict it because the flash preceded the time when the tone should have been presented (ie. it came early). This, despite the fact that the flash happened exactly when the tone should have.

    After telling them what they noticed was impossible, I ran the stimuli again for them. About half those subjects that reported the illusion reported STILL seeing the flash before the sound should have occurred. One of these subjects was my lab assistant, who had helped write the stimulus presentation script for the presentation computer and knew from the outset what was really happening.

    Since this was something that we just ran across while doing research on something else, I didn’t get to go into why it happened. Probably something about time sense being different due to attention to a certain stimulus vs. a stimulus being “ignored”. But this one crossed the “pre-knowledge” barrier in about 20% of all subject and occurred even when they knew it was impossible.

    Many illusions are not “pre-knowledge” persistent like this. Read the comments after the referenced article for evidence of this.

    No, I am not the brain specialist…..
    YES. Yes I AM the brain specialist.

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