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.
This artist’s impression shows the red supergiant star Antares. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO. An international team of astronomers from Chile and Germany has managed to capture an image of unprecedented detail of another star — that isn’t the Sun — the red supergiant star Antares. The team has also made the first map of the velocities of material in the atmosphere of a star other than the Sun, revealing unexpected turbulence in the extended atmosphere of Antares. Antares, also designated Alpha Scorpii, is a well-studied, close red supergiant star at a distance of 554 light years. It is the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky and the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius. With a diameter about 700 times that of the Sun and a mass about 12 times solar, Antares is one of largest stars. This is the most detailed image ever of the red supergiant star Antares, or any other star apart from the Sun. Image credit: K. Ohnaka / ESO. It is thought that Ant...
eleportation is usually been found only in science fiction books and movies. Now, thanks to the special properties of quantum entangled particles, it also takes place in the laboratory. We cannot yet teleport physical objects, but we can teleport the information encoded onto quantum particles. Doing so also allows us to send the information in a secure way, which can be used to protect it from eavesdroppers. Associate Professor Andrea Morello is a researcher and lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at UNSW Australia in Sydney. He was one of the 2013 Australian Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science, the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year.
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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