The McGurk Effect

Here’s the first post in a new section of my blog called ‘Brainteasers’.

This section will be made up of short posts with videos which will show you things you can amaze your friends and family with. They will also fit in with the other sections of my blog, and will show the practical applications of some of the theories I’ve discussed. I hope you will find these demonstrations as fun as I do 🙂

So first up – the McGurk Effect!

Unsurprisingly, this was first identified by someone called McGurk in 1976. It shows the interaction between vision and hearing, and illustrates that what we see overrides what we hear.

When we see a speaker mouth the phoneme ‘ga’ while the sound ‘fa’ is played into our ears, we perceive the sound as ‘ga’. In other words, we believe what our eyes are suggesting is being spoken rather than our ears. This shows the importance of vision in language perception.

Try it for yourselves:

I hope you enjoyed this post – check back soon for more brainteasers and thank you for reading 🙂