Monday, November 13, 2006

The McGurk Effect

Here is a neat phenomenon from a neat book

It is called The McGurk Effect (see it here)

It is a video of a guy saying "ba ba" with an audio layover of him saying "ga ga". Our brains do reconciliation of visual and audio input before it gets to the language center, and the two incongruent inputs merge to form "da da", which is the closest thing that our brain can figure out. This is way lower than consciousness (Miss G could help us out here): we have no choice in the matter!

For St Louisans, McGurk's is a popular Scottish bar, so I suppose a secondary effect would be that everyone sounds like this after a few too many pints of Guiness.

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