Gifs are short, silent animations. Unlike videos, they carry no sound files within them. Which is why it’s extremely odd that a lot of people online claim to be able to hear one.
It’s a gif you’ve probably seen before as it resurfaces every few months, always with a similar caption: Someone asking “why can I hear this”, usually accompanied by a few crying faces to show how distressing they find the experience.
We also know that our perception of sound can be influenced by visual information in other ways, it’s not limited to soundless gifs. The McGurk effect, shown in this video from the BBC’s Horizon program, shows how your brain can be tricked into hearing different things based on the visual information you are perceiving at the time.
In this case, you won’t be able to tell whether you’re hearing “baa” or “faa” because of the way the man’s mouth is moving. What you see can override what you hear.
But is it possible for visual stimulus alone to cause people to hear sound? Short answer: Yes.
A study earlier this year found that 22 percent of participants could “hear” faint sounds when they were shown a flash of light, even though no sound occurred.
We already knew that some people in the population (around 5 percent) have synesthesia, a phenomenon where information received from one sense (e.g. sound) is perceived by another (e.g. taste) automatically and involuntarily. However, this study showed that a lot more of the population “heard motion” – hearing sounds in response to visual stimulus – than was previously thought. It’s not an effect limited to synesthetes.
So if it’s possible to trigger an auditory response using a simple flash of light, this gif of the power pylons skipping may just be a particularly good example of how a stimulus can cause this effect, hence why so many people seem to “hear” it.
Scientists using data from the Cassini spacecraft have discovered something unusual about the shadow cast on Saturn by its rings. Cassini was sent crashing into Saturn in September as its mission came to an end. However, in its final months, it dipped to between 2,600 and 4,000 kilometers (1,600 and 2,500 miles) above the planet to gather invaluable science. Research conducted by scientists in Sweden and the US, and published in Science , looked at data from this period. And they found that the shadow of the ring, which Cassini flew through, was having a direct effect on the ionosphere of Saturn – its upper atmosphere. “The ionosphere is surprisingly variable and structured on small scales,” a short statement from the team read. “One reason for that is shadows cast by the rings, which block ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, thereby reducing the ionization in those regions.” On these passes, the Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrumen...
This weird yet amazing Cosmic Snake galaxy is actually behind a massive galaxy cluster called MACS J1206.2-0847, but thanks to the cluster’s gravity, we can see it directly from Earth. Light from the distant galaxy arrives at Earth, having been distorted by the gigantic gravitational influence of the intervening cluster. Fascinatingly, instead of making it more difficult to perceive cosmological objects, such strong lensing effects improve the resolution and depth of an image by magnifying the background object. Sometimes gravitational lensing can even produce multiple images of the object as light is bent in different directions around the foreground cluster. Using Hubble, Dr. Antonio Cava of the Université de Genève and co-authors looked at several such images of the Cosmic Snake, each with a different level of magnification. “The amplified images are more precise, luminous, and allows us to observe details up to 100 times smaller,” Dr. Cava said. The Hubble ...
While investigating the lunar surface, China's Chang'e 3 lander found another sort of moon shake, and figured out how to snap THOUSANDS of high-determination pictures of the moon. Interestingly, you can take a look at the lunar surface more than ever because of the complex cameras found locally available the Chang'e 3, one of China's most progressive lunar landers. The Lunar Mission touched down on the moon in 2013, on the area known as Mare Imbrium – where scientists have faith in the inaccessible past, genuine water could have existed—making China the third nation in the historical backdrop of humankind to accomplish a delicate arriving on the lunar surface, after the Soviet Union and United States of America. While the mission occurred in 2013, China's National Space Administration discharged a huge number of the top notch pictures amid 2015. The pictures in any case, weren't shown by western media because of the way that China is utilized to di...
Gifs are short, silent animations. Unlike videos, they carry no sound files within them. Which is why it’s extremely odd that a lot of people online claim to be able to hear one.
It’s a gif you’ve probably seen before as it resurfaces every few months, always with a similar caption: Someone asking “why can I hear this”, usually accompanied by a few crying faces to show how distressing they find the experience.
We also know that our perception of sound can be influenced by visual information in other ways, it’s not limited to soundless gifs. The McGurk effect, shown in this video from the BBC’s Horizon program, shows how your brain can be tricked into hearing different things based on the visual information you are perceiving at the time.
In this case, you won’t be able to tell whether you’re hearing “baa” or “faa” because of the way the man’s mouth is moving. What you see can override what you hear.
But is it possible for visual stimulus alone to cause people to hear sound? Short answer: Yes.
A study earlier this year found that 22 percent of participants could “hear” faint sounds when they were shown a flash of light, even though no sound occurred.
We already knew that some people in the population (around 5 percent) have synesthesia, a phenomenon where information received from one sense (e.g. sound) is perceived by another (e.g. taste) automatically and involuntarily. However, this study showed that a lot more of the population “heard motion” – hearing sounds in response to visual stimulus – than was previously thought. It’s not an effect limited to synesthetes.
So if it’s possible to trigger an auditory response using a simple flash of light, this gif of the power pylons skipping may just be a particularly good example of how a stimulus can cause this effect, hence why so many people seem to “hear” it.
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