Has it ever happened to you that you have seen a poorly dubbed foreign film in which you have noticed that the sounds you hear coming out of the actors’ mouths do not match the movements of their lips? The dubbing may be bad, but the so-called McGurk effect is also taking place, which is a phenomenon in which visual speech , that is, the movements of someone’s mouth and lips, and speech conflict. auditory , which are the sounds that a person hears.
McGurk effect: The strange effect that makes us hear the word we read
Our brain is not perfect: although it is an impossible machine to replicate, it can be the subject of really curious phenomena. An example is demonstrated by optical illusions , images, some even really simple, that can make our gray matter look seriously “conflicted.” Regarding this issue, the McGurk effect is particularly relevant, which, in short, is a phenomenon of perception in which we can suddenly only hear what we are seeing or reading.
Explaining it is difficult, but the following video will help us, which went viral recently and caused many people to wonder what the “trick” or magic behind what was shown was. And it is that when listening to the sound, our ears (and our brain) decide that we can only understand one of the two words that are shown. Do the test:
Blows my mind… pic.twitter.com/bYarCJ7Gby
— The Prison Lawyer (@ThePrisonLawyer) January 8, 2021
As you can see, in the video there are two words “Green Needle” and “Brainstorm” (“Brainstorming”). The audio of the video only repeats one word, but depending on which one we focus on or simply the one we are reading, we will hear one or the other . What the hell is going on? No, you are not going crazy, it is simply a “play” that our brains play on us. Our gray matter, in fact, is trying to understand what it thinks it is hearing, with a sound closer to what it reads (or sees).
In short, therefore, the brain is trying to understand not only with the ears, but also with the eyes .
The effect was first described in an experiment conducted in 1976 by psychologists Harry McGurk and John MacDonald . The test showed that visual information can influence and ignore what a person thinks they hear.
