Caught Our Attention: Brainstorm and Green Needle

I am starting a new series called Caught Our Attention, where I will be looking at interesting events, news reports, and interesting videos from social media.

To kick this off, I would like to share an experience I had a few weeks ago. I received a link to a short video on Instagram from a friend of mine. We tend to enjoy the same types of content so I immediately clicked on it and listened.

The video starts off saying “you will only hear the word you are reading”. It displays two words on the screen, one to the left and the other to the right. On the left side of your screen is the word “Green Needle” in green and on the right is the word “Brainstorm”.

So I began the exercise. I closed the app several times and tried various methods to beat whatever trickery this was. Each time I would hear what I was reading. I tried closing my eyes as well.

Curious as to what this is and how they pulled this off, I forwarded the video to my brother. He is a pretty intelligent guy so I waited for his scientific explanation. He didn’t immediately give me one and so like most people these days, I moved on to something else.

A few days later, my brother was visiting me. He pulls up the video and says let’s try something. He suggest he looks at “green needle” and I look at “brainstorm” and we watch off the same phone screen. Clearly, we are two very busy people!

We begin with our little experiment off the same screen. Each of us hears the word we are looking at. Not convinced, we agreed to switch word. Again we both heard the word we selected.

We both laughed. So I say to him, this makes me questions so many things. Like when you look in the mirror and see yourself as beautiful and someone else not so much, is this a brainstorm vs. green needle moment? Again we laugh it off and then move on.

Few days later my brother told me to look up “McGurk Effect”. At the time I had not heard about this phenomenon.

What is the McGurk Effect?

The McGurk Effect, named after Harry McGurk, is an audio-visual phenomenon that shows an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The idea is that an illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound leading to the perception of a third sound.

What this means is that the information we receive when we can visualize a person changes the way we hear the sound. So essentially, if we do not have good audio quality but have good visuals, we tend to experience the McGurk effect.

I learned that the phenomenon was first described in a paper by Harry McGurk and John McDonald titled “Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices“.

Turns out many people have been curious about this McGurk Effect for many years but it resurfaced again on social media more recently.

So have you tried the “Brainstorm vs. Green Needle exercise? Let me know your thoughts of if anything else caught your attention this week.