![]() As Popular Science pointed out, it's kind of like when you focus on the person talking to you at a noisy party, then switch focus to eavesdrop on the person behind you.īut what if you can't toggle between the two? What if you are squarely Team L or Team Y, no matter how many times you listen? Is there something wrong with your ears? Some people, especially when they know they can potentially hear two different words, are able to mentally toggle between the two words. "Some people, because of past experiences - an ex named Laurel? - may simply be more likely to hear one versus the other," he explained. hears what it wants to and what it thinks it should hear," Justin Golub, an assistant professor of otology, neurotology, and skull base surgery at Columbia University Medical Center, said via email. If you're interested in hearing Yanny, it's more likely your brain can pull it off under the right circumstances (sound mixing, speakers, headphones, et cetera). If you're interested in hearing Laurel, your brain is more likely to pay attention to those sounds. People have varying sensitivities to different frequencies, so your brain may interpret noises differently than others.Īnother factor is personal expectation. It's also important to remember that no two people hear the same things when listening to any given piece of audio. When the volume is turned back up, or if the audio is played on speakers with a higher bass response, they'll probably hear Laurel. The sounds that compose the tinny "Yanny" sound are of a higher frequency than those that compose "Laurel." That's why when some people turn the volume down - thus ridding the clip of much of its bass - they'll hear Yanny. Whether you hear Yanny or Laurel is in part due to the volume at which you perceive certain frequencies. And if you're still just hearing Yanny? That's (probably) totally fine too. According to the Redditor who started this whole mess, the viral audio was recorded from the entry for the word "laurel," meaning that those Team Laurel stalwarts are technically correct.īut that doesn't mean it's not an ambiguous recording. Yanny or Laurel, not some blend.To be clear, we pretty much know what's going on with the clip now, including its benign origins. Without conscious effort, our brain decides what our ears are hearing. While we could agree that our couch looks blackish green, there is no such compromise in the perception of speech. Originally described in 1957 and supported by countless additional studies, the idea is that your brain naturally sorts things into categories.įor example, my husband and I can never agree on the color of our couch (definitely green, not black, by the way), because while there is easily a continuum between very dark green and black, the boundaries between them vary for everyone. The fact that, for the life of me, I can only hear “Laurel” is because of a phenomenon called categorical perception. In this case, the sound is missing a few elements and your brain automatically makes a judgment, called interpolation, similar to how you can so easily read partially erased text. ![]() ![]() Because of this, it is the brain of the listener that decides their identity, based on context. The way one pronounces them morphs based on the sounds that come before and after them in a word. Without a doubt, all this confusion is only possible because of the consonants in “Yanny” and “Laurel.” The “y,” “n,” “l” and “r” sounds are really the chameleons of speech. ![]()
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