How Auditory Illusions Trick Your Brain into Hearing Things

Your brain relies a lot on context to tell you what sounds are bouncing around in your ears, and without enough of that context it can get a little confused.
Hosted by: Brit Garner
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Sources:
www.utdallas.edu/~assmann/hcs6...
www.jstor.org/stable/27855552...
www.haskins.yale.edu/SR/sr114/...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NB...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
www.nature.com/articles/nn099...
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b574...
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psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/1981-...
science.sciencemag.org/content...
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[@GameTesterBootCamp]

"The football player lost a shoe" ~Satan~

[@tvdan1043]

Brian you should tread lightly here...

You forgot a "L" as the second letter in that name.

[@renardroi1136]

wow sci-show is really calling out all ghost hunting shows ever

[@maxsalmon4980]

DID YOU HEAR THAT?!

[@jovanzeng]

That garbled sound is actually nightmare fuel. Thanks, I wasn't planning on sleeping anyway.

[@Nioub]

Please NEVER do that again.

[@veryberry39]

I know, that was pretty awful. >

[@PeelingFlame]

Are you kidding? the whole babababa/fafafafa was the real horror here

[@gravijta936]

And this is why so many people sing the wrong words for so many songs.

[@alveolate]

mondegreens! 'scuse me, while i kiss this guy.

[@360.Tapestry]

a limited vocabulary of words and concepts also contributes to that

[@leksdic]

And now i'm going to have nightmares about that foodball player that lost their shoe! 😨

[@lonewolf9604]

😂😂😂

[@maebon]

At 2:33 is Brit unconsciously using the sign language for D and T? That's kind of cool.

[@theillytellez3761]

Give a man a warning!!! Sweet jesus, That football player who lost a shoe almost gave me a heart attack! XDD

[@gravijta936]

Interesting! Every time I hear a chicken clucking, I hear "Eat me! Eat me! I'm delicious! Eat me!".

[@theinkweaver]

I see you there with your sign language D and T. *appreciative head nod*

[@emk7132]

In a vid about hearing tho...

[@sebastianelytron8450]

And that, boys and girls, is why I refuse to watch anything without subtitles.

[@movement2contact]

logic > 9000 ...

[@VariantAEC]

Sebastian Elytron Hopefully not those subs auto generated by YT...

[@udtheaesir]

Subtitle power!

[@vrapbrap]

Are you dumb or just illiterate?

[@jeffreybernath6627]

Watch out for bonus fingerspelling at 2:34.

[@ShadowDrakken]

I caught that too, it threw me off for a second because I wasn't expecting sign language. I'm guessing she's somewhat fluent and uses it regularly.

[@rainynight02]

But... That wasn't a "D" as I've ever seen it before. 0_o (I'm a novice, at best, but never seen a "d" like that.)

[@ajo7009]

Could you possibly do a video on auditory processing disorder (APD)? I happen to have APD, and it would be interesting to learn about some of the science behind it.

[@aquamarine3699]

“So basically, brains are really weird and amazing!” so true ❤️🧠❤️ love scishow psych!

[@RangerRuby]

Wow. That is truely interesting! Our brains are so complex and amazing! I can't wait for SciShow Psychs next video!

[@PuzzlesExplained]

Wow, that's actually really interesting. And holy cow you guys have a lot of sources for this video lol

[@mekangtogo420]

Thank you for this episode! The topic is already interesting, but your usage of tests really complemented it.

[@jangambler9998]

0:42 In the context of this video being on the internet all I could hear and read was 'phomemes'.

[@Zedigan]

One interesting illusion is when some British or Australians say "over-all" we hear it as "OVAH AWL" but some English speakers from north America will hear us say "OVAR AWL" with the r. This is thought to be because we're so used to hearing words like "over" be pronounced "ovah" or "ovuh" and the hard R sound comes when we roll the transition between the two words. But people from north America who pronounce almost every R in any word as a hard R are used to hearing it so they pick up on it. This blew my mind when I first learned about it.

[@Sara-vn2kz]

This was great! One of your best videos to date! Thanks for explaining all that to me.

[@kasnitch]

I love it when I belch words and I hear two voices . you're never alone then .

[@christelheadington1136]

You'll be alone, after you do that in front of people.

[@TGC40401]

I heard "If i thought what your mouth could feel" @ 3:01 and my day was instantly better.

[@bobbyhalick]

Great episode!

[@kitvalentine7593]

this was so freakin amazing, I love this stuff

[@nicolaiveliki1409]

The dialect of German from where I grew up doesn't disambiguate d and t, g and k, or b and p, which leads to some awkward and amusing situations especially in spelling (d like dorothy or d like domas, baula b or bertha b). Listening to them speak can be rather difficult because you can only tell from context whether they are saying either of those consonants, but this is even more difficult due to unusual vowel/consonant fusions (er -> ae, ir -> ia)

[@aspendrakeelkins443]

I took a semester of Language Psychology and had to listen to those confusing and/or horrifying sounds in nearly every class. It was truly interesting and **I never want to do it again!!**

[@thisaccountisdead9060]

I've been watching so much SciShow lately, I've got SciShow coming out of my ears!!! :D ( ....the beaming eyes of the emoticon > :D < stare out into the world... ...there is no answer, but eternal silence... )

[@amyrenae1019]

Awesome video! Illusions are really fascinating. Visual illusions are good too. Maybe do a vid about that?

[@sunshine6997]

Sometimes when I'm watching a KZbin video and there's a lot of background noise, I'll fullscreen the video so I can "hear" what's being said better. I'm really just doing it so I can see the presenter's mouth movements more clearly as context for the audio.

[@charlotte-mg9wj]

Wow this makes to much sense! i'm learning Greek and Farsi at the moment and I'm finding Greek harder even though Farsi is supposed to be the more difficult one for native English speakers.when people ask me why i've tried to explain and they don't get it,but now i'm just going to tell them to watch this because it hit's the nail on the head.

[@NyAppyMiku22]

that recording is nightmare fuel

[@Panxho24]

2:09 lol, my native language is spanish and instead of hearing "ba" I hear "pa", because in spanish you mouth the sound of p as you mouth b

[@maxsalmon4980]

The other side of being the pattern recognition engines we are, I guess. Our ability to pick out conversations across rooms with reasonable accuracy, or recognize words despite accents and malformed grammar comes with the potential to mistake 'noise' as 'signal' or otherwise perceive content inaccurately. From the standpoint of social evolution, there's not a LOT of downside, even if it can be awkward at times for us individual humans. :)

[@horseenthusiast1250]

Oh, in my Yurok language class we learned about that first effect! Yurok has quite a few phonemes that English doesn't (though I was able to get one of them down pretty fast); most notably, the "s" is somewhere between an English "s" and "sh," the "g" is kinda soft and half-way to being an English "y," "hl" makes the same sound as the Welsh "ll" (this is the one that was easiest for me to remember, since I know a teeny tiny bit of Welsh), and...well, "x" is something I can't pronounce yet that doesn't really have an English equivalent, and idk the linguistic name for it, but it sounds to the average native English speaker like someone quickly clearing their throat. It's really cool. There's also a lot of long vowels, glottal stops, and pronounced "h" sounds in Yurok that were tricky for most students to learn, so they'd default to English pronunciation (like saying "Pa'ah," pronounced with an a like ax, as "Pa'a," dropping the "h" sound and saying the a like how you would in papa).

[@JackSparrow-tn6ic]

As a german person, I can never hear the difference between soft and hard endings in english. Like, mate and made are the same for me. Or late and laid. If I really focus and you exaggerate the pronounciation, I could probably differentiate, but in normal speech I can't. And when I try to exaggerate the soft or hard ending, it still sounds the same.

[@metalanimesoul]

Is this a reupload? Anyways, love this channel!

[@freshoutofcrabs]

Could you also do an episode on non-linguistic auditory illusions, like the Shepard scale?

[@ColinJonesPonder]

Brainstorm / green needle is the best I've heard so far.

[@hellonwheels4384]

I'd love to see this episode expanded to talk about those with auditory processing disorders.

[@protohale]

It takes a whole lot of processing to understand what words people are saying at all. In English, we use about 44 different sounds to communicate. A fluent Arabic speaker would likely hear two different sounds: a scratchier KHEE and a sharper COO. Researchers have found that 6-month-old infants can tell apart pretty much any phoneme when you play it through headphones. In this experiment, researchers made a sound halfway between a D and a T, so most people couldn't tell the difference. But when they put A-S-K after it, most people think it's a T, even though it's the same ambiguous sound as "task". The sounds of "yanny" and "laurel" were above 4500 Hertz, which is near the top of where our brains expect spoken language to be. People need to crank really low and really high frequencies up to a higher amplitude in order to perceive them to be the same volume. Many people discovered, like the shoeless football player, that they could change what they heard simply by focusing their minds on one word or the other.

[@VEE727]

That was an awesome video because I could participate in the experiments and witness my own brain making sense of things

[@elanianiyvwia8687]

FINALLY AN EXPLANATION OF LAURAL YANNY!!! We need this!! Stop the presses!!!! This is major news!!!!

[@FacelessOfficial1]

2:08 wait... I'm usually extremelly bad at enjoying illusions since many of them don't work on me but this one.....works 100%....thanks

[@dxny.hrtmn_]

Well I'm watching this at night and the first recording of 'the football player lost a shoe' was really scary 😱

[@NateLVBrown]

Most people here in the Comments are not going to believe me, but I’ll share this anyway for the curious. I have not been ‘fooled’ by ANY of these recent examples. I heard “Laurel”, no matter what side of the screen I looked at I only heard “Bah”, the ‘Football’ one never sounded different to me, etcetera etcetera etc. !! 🤗 I’m partially Deaf, a chunk of my hearing near the middle range is damaged beyond repair with each ear thankfully missing different bits, and often struggle to understand people around me (I’m a bloody good lip reader though 🤫). I believe this is a large part of why these ‘auditory illusions’ almost never work properly for me..... ‘cause they rely on me being able to hear the mid-range, which I cannot, though I apparently have excellent high-range hearing for my Age. 😅

[@thstroyur]

Huh. I think there's some pareidolia thrown somewhere here - specially in the football shoe thing

[@JosephDavies]

Yeah, I was waiting for her to reveal that it was actually just static and they made up a sentence to fit it. This was a good opportunity to mention auditory priming.

[@MewtwoExMasterMusic]

I like the references

[@mohamedal-ganzoury3699]

I'm a fluent Arabic speaker...and I heard the exact same sound :D

[@AnimilesYT]

So, there is this remix of a Hatusne Miku song, and in its lyrics it sais "I think of you". But somewhere else the lyrics said "I sing for you". Now I can hear both depending on which one I want to hear. the song: /watch?v=2brEjqK4BgQ

[@aidran007]

....and Satan said “A football player lost a shoe”... seriously that made my skin crawl 😱

[@Lizfth2]

Can you do a video explaining why you can "hear" noise in your head when watching video? An example being the video of the telephone poles playing jump rope with the wire, you "hear" the thump as the pole hits the ground.

[@lisagarner2748]

Personally, I like the BOLD new color ~

[@PersonsUnknown]

I really liked the football player lost a shoe part

[@spaceace87]

SUCH A COOL EPISODE. Sorry for yelling, I just really liked it 💜

[@Delluvian]

I noticed that shirt. Waited so long for her to sing some misheard lyrics. Next time, Brit...

[@DuluthTW]

Very interesting. I clearly heard yanny w/o even a question that it could be laurel. Does that mean I have hearing comparable to a dog? Thanks!

[@davidbuschhorn6539]

One of my friend's wife was telling me we were going to eat at a place called "Top of China Buffet." Because of her Philadelphia accent, I couldn't understand what she was saying. I asked her to repeat herself so many times it was embarrassing! I thought she was saying "Top of Vagina Buffet." Only when her husband said the words did I get it. They thought it was a riot when I told them. I still feel embarrassed! They're Mormons and the nicest people so I felt especially awkward.

[@aspendrakeelkins443]

This is just amazing. X-D

[@davidbuschhorn6539]

I can still feel the embarrassment.

[@tostupidforname]

The first time it didnt work but it acually does. Thats cool

[@Barde_Jaune]

Brains can be tricked. I hate being tricked. I have a love/hate relationship with brains. They're really awesome but they suck at the same time.

[@UrvineSpiegel]

Gonna have to update my brain's antivirus after this.

[@lajya01]

You can also hear lyrics in your native language even though the song is not. You cannot "unhear" it easily even if you're perfect bilingual.

[@Reirae]

I've had a lot of people not know wtf I was saying cause they were expecting a different accent. It's happened back to me too. Expecting a Dublin accent but getting a Kerry one. You wonder if it's even English. Once you realise though, it's easy to understand.

[@Kettvnen]

2:11 I heard "va" on the right.

[@JimandPamfan]

I saw that T you finger spelled!! Me too girl! Me too!

[@artesiningart4961]

I am a Filipino, and I heard "pa" while looking on the left and "fa" while looking on the right. I didn't heard any strong and distinct "ba" even I tried it many times.

[@teas9892]

The speaker speaks a bit too fast in my opinion, but this is a good video. Very educational.

[@gab.lab.martins]

4:11 AAHH, SUDDEN MAKE-UP DISAPPEARANCE

[@Brown95P]

Is it weird that, on the 2:05 test while blind, I keep hearing "ba" gradually becoming "fa" throughout the clip? Like, when I watch the mouth movements, yeah, the illusion effect gets me no matter how I look at it, but when I don't, I keep getting the same sound graduation all the time. I should probably chalk it up to mic output quality, since I *did* hear some minor noise around the middle area of the clip.

[@christelheadington1136]

I cannot remember which, but there was commercial on TV, that sounded weird, from another room. When I finally stopped to watch it, made sense. The strange part ? It was the Peanuts cartoon characters.

[@Brown95P]

*w a t*

[@jesusramirezromo2037]

2:14 for me it shifted to Pa, might be because I'm a native Spanish speaker

[@monimacer5769]

That haircut was a bold choice

[@lisagarner2748]

Leon!

[@lisagarner2748]

Nice inclusion of habituation as a research method!

[@PatrickAllenNL]

I hear my ringtone sometimes

[@eammonmcgrory2977]

same, even when there is no sound playing i hear it clear as a bell, usually in the morning, wonder why that is

[@Alr1ghtyThen]

I also get the phantom buzz in my pocket when my phone isn't there. Spooky stuff

[@CryptoTalk1980]

Prob explains how those spirit bozes actually work. Whe. You think hard enough you start hearing what you expect to be hearing

[@eruyommo]

4:15 What happened with her hair?

[@symoneontheinternet]

Language is so coooollll!!!!! Also the brain is so cool!!!!!! Yay science

[@nerysghemor5781]

You can regain the ability to hear different phonemes that aren’t in your native language but it does take effort.

[@HorzaPanda]

Nevermind me, I'm just going to trim my tache >_> So where you are from might affect that dash/tash thing XD

[@KevOSMusic]

Interesting. I heard "V" rather than "F". Probably because a soft "B" in my second language (Irish) sounds like a "V" or "W".

[@torinsgarden1437]

Sounds like all of physical reality explained. Even what the brain is. The brain is in the mind, a conceptualization

[@theillytellez3761]

Just today i thought someone called my name three times. Just cant deal

[@DezzieYT]

I heard "ba" and "va". Also, is this why I have a hard time understanding people on the phone even though I have no problems understanding people in person?

[@Blue_Spirit7]

You have the ability to hear the future :)

[@kennedyfamilypa]

And then there is those of us with auditory processing disorder

[@alicered4198]

I heard "pa" for both mouth movements. I felt like I was supposed to hear va but still heard pa.

[@trevorgrover5619]

Looking forward to hearing loss

[@fivesix3868]

I am incredibly early! And this video is great!

[@llammb]

Ok but what if u just hear things lol like clear conversations but it’s just quiet enough that you can’t understand them, like hallucinations but sound, so hearing things from dead silence

[@brokenacoustic]

I wanted to make a Home Videos reference joke about Coach McGuirk, but its spelled differently. Dang... Also, couldve mentioned binaural beats, theyre interesting auditory illusions.

[@NewMessage]

I hear ya... I think.

[@shrimpbisque]

When I first listened to that Yanny/Laurel clip, I heard something more like "yerrill".

[@HereticalKitsune]

wtf, the ba-fa thing was so confusing! xD

[@birdsdaword]

That's why I heard both Laurel and Yanni at the same time. I couldn't figure out what the big deal was.

[@dudeimadolphin4318]

did anyone else notice the scenes where her hair furelled out and then went bakc to normal the next scene

[@spaceace87]

Haha I thought the same thing! During the yanny/laurel discussion I literally went back 10 seconds to see if it really changed or if I was imagining it.

[@insolubletoaster8133]

also her makeup is different and her hair looks a bit longer? they might shoot these way in advance and then they had to add that stuff? or maybe something happened andthey hadto reshoot?

[@moonstar10633]

Probably did the shoots on multiple days and then stitched them together.

[@theDreadedBlur]

Puts lyrics into a better perspective.

[@Kevan808]

So what you're saying is Satan lost a football shoe?

[@cavv0667]

Fleshy computers that can analyze how easily they are falsely led to a conclusion... I love that droves of humans study just how very true it is... we are programs on organic hardware. A little spooky and very very interesting!!!

[@TheMr77469]

Ba and Fa seemed creepy watching it.

[@gothwarrior1]

Film Theorists did a similar video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qZLLpGeBf5lnl9k which also had some very good examples (some of which I thought were even better than in this video), and with some emphasis on slightly different points like the number of syllables you expect to hear. It's worth a watch.

[@JayDaPeace]

Do we know what happens to babies who were raised with more than one language being spoken around then?

[@mariofloress]

Idk why the only thing I could focus on was her hair kept changing!