![]() “Personal history can also give an unconscious preference for one or another. “If you heard a conversation happening around you regarding ‘Laurel’ you wouldn’t have heard ‘Yanny’. “When the brain is uncertain of something, it uses surrounding cues to help you make the right decision,” he said. Prof Hugh McDermott from Melbourne’s Bionics Institute suggests that while the frequency of the device you are listening on does have an impact, there are “a lot of different factors playing into it”. frequencies of the Y might have been made artificially higher, and the frequencies that make the L sound might have been dropped.” “Most sounds – including L and Y, which are among the ones at issue here – are made up of several frequencies at once. Speaking to the Verge, Riecke suggests the “secret is frequency … but some of it is also the mechanics of your ears, and what you’re expecting to hear”. This argument is further supported by the assistant professor of audition and cognitive neuroscience Lars Riecke at Maastricht University. At 52 his ears lack high frequency sensitivity, a natural result of ageing and secondly, a difference in pronunciation between the North American accented computer-generated “Yanny” and “Laurel” and how the words would naturally be spoken in Australian or British English. That lack of ambiguity he says is probably down to two reasons: firstly his age. “All of this goes to highlight just how much the brain is an active interpreter of sensory input, and thus that the external world is less objective than we like to believe.”Īlais says that for him, and presumably many others, it’s “100% Yanny” without any ambiguity. ![]() Here, the Yanny/Laurel sound is meant to be ambiguous because each sound has a similar timing and energy content – so in principle it’s confusable. ![]() “If there is little ambiguity, the brain locks on to a single perceptual interpretation. This happens because the brain can’t decide on a definitive interpretation,” Alais says. “They can be seen in two ways, and often the mind flips back and forth between the two interpretations. Professor David Alais from the University of Sydney’s school of psychology says the Yanny/Laurel sound is an example of a “perceptually ambiguous stimulus” such as the Necker cube or the face/vase illusion. What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel /jvHhCbMc8I- Cloe Feldman May 15, 2018
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