The McGurk Effect

Via the BBC: The McGurk effect is a compelling demonstration of how we all use visual speech information. The effect shows that we can’t help but integrate visual speech into what we ‘hear’.

Or, further explained by Wikipedia:

The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon which demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. It suggests that speech perception is multimodal, that is, that it involves information from more than one sensory modality. The McGurk effect is sometimes called the McGurk-MacDonald effect.

Nathan

WHOA. That’s intense.
Rasheedah

My mind is blown!
Matt

I hear “Ba Ba Ba” and “Fa Fa Fa”…McGurk Effect Fail.
- Coen
  
  exactly. it doesnt work with everyone.
  - bo
    
    it does work, play it an close your eyes when he starts saying ba, and when it switches open your eyes and close them it’ll switch between ba and fa depending on when your eyes are open and closed, it tripped me out!!
- Jon
  
  That’s the idea…
  He’s only ever saying “Ba,” he never actually says “Va/Fa.”
- DT
  
  That IS the McGurk Effect. Your brain interprets what you hear to make it correspond to what you see. If, regardless of of what you were seeing, you always heard “ba ba ba” — which is what is actually being said — then that would be a failure of the McGurk Effect.
  
  Your comment indicates something more like Matt Reading Ability Fail.
- John
  
  That’s what you’re supposed to hear…
- Dave
  
  no, that is th whole point of it. You hear/interpret Fa instead of the actual sound of Ba because of his mouth movements. Close your eyes when he does the Fa, this eliminates his mouth movements and you’ll hear Ba.
Matt

Oh wait…that’s what the McGurk Effect is.
http://autom-atic.blogspot.com/ bhavna

i hear both fa and pa…the theory fails for me
- becca
  
  youre an idiot
- bafafa
  
  that’s the idea… you’re supposed to hear both fa and ba (or pa, if you prefer).
Anonymous

That’s the point. If you hear “ba” and “fa”, it’s because your sight is creating the illusion that the man is saying “fa” when, in reality, he’s always saying “ba”. He never once says “fa”.
Jcas

no if you dont watch the video and listen
you can tell hes saying both
‘fa’ and ‘ba’
- Jon
  
  No, he doesn’t. I replayed it over and over again while closing my eyes to make sure I couldn’t be affected and I only heard ba ba ba.
Faaaaaa

We’re definitely seeing him say “va” not “fa”, to make an F sound, your top teeth are behind your lips…Say the word “first” or “fabulous”, to make a V sound, your top teeth move backward over your bottom lip, especially when you’re really enunciating like he his in the video to make a point of it.
Cody

You are all morons. Did any of you actually watch and listen to what the man said? The only sounds he makes, throughout the entire video, is “ba”. Your brain sees his mouth making the “f” sound, and tricks your ears into hearing “fa”. Entienden?
Jonathan

Everyone on the internet is a fucking moronic idiot! Fuck you and fuck me! Fuck us all!
wow just wow

I have lost all faith in humanity many many time over reading comments on blogs. This is one of the worst. A video about listening and the people watching it dont listen.
Wow indeed

I can only hope that Matt and others who can’t understand this or think this was some sort of “trick” are just trolls. Otherwise I’ve lost faith in humanity as well
loop_exec

dont feed the troll 1o1
- Wizzy
  
  lol
jason

This entire chat is doing little to reinforce my failing faith in humanity.

And btw, failing and then saying you were just trolling is turbogay.
wow

you are all retards. just because he says he is making the same sound doesn’t mean it is exactly the same in both cases. try making the sound “ba” the way he does, by dragging your top teeth over your bottom lip. you will hear it is slightly different even though you can’t see your own mouth. oddly enough in order to create the “b” sound in english you have to touch both your lips together, and just saying he is making the same sound isn’t convincing.
- Anonymous
  
  You clearly don’t understand that he is not actually saying anything when he is dragging his teeth. They are just replaying the sound of the “ba” again as a voiceover, and that’s how they know it’s the same sound. We just perceive it as different because of the McGurk effect.
Anonymous

this is sooooo dumb, what a waste of 20 something years (whatever he said
)
william

The fact that some just don’t “get it” is just as real a psychological effect as McGurk itself. It is why David Hannum said “a sucker was born every minute”, and he was of coarse. It is why we believe anything that is repeated to us over and over again, why we belive we make choices when the choices were already made for us, why despots rise to power, and we die for causes we don’t really understand. It is why that even in the face of incontrovertible evidence our beliefs remain consistent with the investment we have made in them; why we believe things about people we love that just simply are not true… The point, if there be one, is that no one lies to us nearly so well as we lie to ourselves.
Kirrim Cornelis

This comment section almost made me cry.
Matt

This is interesting. But I laugh at the spin they put on it – ‘This what happens when the senses come into conflict’.
If anything this is a positive thing that the brain does, right? It proves that over the course of our long evolution into using speech, the brain has learned to look at the mouth of a pesron who is speaking to get more information about what words are being said.
How can this be negative? When in life are we going to meet some evil wizard who will try to trick us by saying one word while mouthing another?

The McGurk Effect

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