When you hear speech, your brain will process it “top-down” ( that’s a term used by a 2006 study into this). In exactly the same manner Ben’s act is not revealing the words being sung, but instead he is priming you and that is why his illusion works. You know that those supposedly secret satanic messages are not really there. When you are then primed and told what the message is, then, and only then, can you hear it. What is fascinating about that is that if you simply hear the sound without being primed then you do not hear the “secret” message. You might perhaps be old enough to recall the fad that involved playing songs backwards to reveal supposed secret satanic messages. What is being leveraged here is your brain’s intense preference for meaningful language. Over vast tracts of time and an almost countless number of generations your brain has been selected to value language over and above other sounds. You have been naturally selected for language. So what is going on here, how is it possible for you to actually hear things that you also know are not actually there at all? This was a very entertaining example of an audio illusion being triggered by what is known as priming. His act consisted of playing various very well-known songs, but he primed you to hear something distinctly different by holding up a series of signs. Pictured above is Ben Langley on Britains Got Talent last weekend. First, let’s talk about audio illusions in general. They also plan to investigate visual disappearances and other examples of things people can perceive as being absent.I’m building up to an explanation for the “Yanni or Laurel” audio illusion. The researchers plan to keep exploring the extent to which people hear silence, including whether we hear silences that are not preceded by sound. The findings establish a new way to study the perception of absence, the team said. "The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too." "There's at least one thing that we hear that isn't a sound, and that's the silence that happens when sounds go away," said co-author Ian Phillips, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences. It was that the same illusions that scientists thought could only be triggered with sounds worked just as well when the sounds were replaced by silences. The idea wasn't simply that these silences made people experience illusions, the researchers said. They then listened for periods within those audio tracks when all sound stopped abruptly, creating brief silences. Participants were asked to listen to soundscapes that simulated the din of busy restaurants, markets, and train stations. If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all." "Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds. "Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn't been a scientific study aimed directly at this question," said Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences who directs the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. The fact that these silence-based illusions produced exactly the same results as their sound-based counterparts suggests that people hear silence just as they hear sounds, the researchers said. In the team's new silence-based illusion, an equivalent moment of silence also seemed longer than it really was. For example, one illusion made a sound seem much longer than it really was. The team adapted well-known auditory illusions to create versions in which the sounds of the original illusions were replaced by moments of silence. Video credit: Roy Henry/Johns Hopkins University
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