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.
Experts have restored one of the largest known early maps of the world, and it's glorious, mythical creatures and all. The hand-drawn map was created 430 years ago by Urbano Monte. Centuries later, collector David Rumsey and his nephew have painstakingly scanned and digitally stitched together all 60 pages previously bound in an atlas, completing the map for the first time as it was originally intended. While little is known about the 16th-century cartographer who made it, the newly restored map gives insight into how people at the time understood the world. Created in 1587 in Milan, Italy, it shows the world in great detail, and was quite advanced for its day. The world as seen from above, looking down on the North Pole, was a perspective not commonly used by mapmakers at the time. Monte's depiction of Japan also shows a lot more place names than maps made by his contemporaries, likely because Monte met with Japanese delegations when they visited Milan in 1585,...
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...
Syria holds some of the world’s most incredible historical sites. Even with the civil war still raging in parts of the country, researchers have been busy discovering countless archeological gems. Now, archeologists have stumbled upon a network of military structures used for surveillance and communication during the Middle Bronze Age (2nd millennium BCE). Researchers used aerial surveillance and satellite images to discover the vast string of structures hiding in plain site in the arid lands of northern Syria. The research – a collaboration between the French National Center for Scientific Research, the University of Lyon in France, and the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums of Syria – was published in the journal Paléorient this week. The 4,000-year-old network consists of a chain of fortresses, forts, towers, walls, and enclosures that were once linked up by large uncut basalt blocks and walls of several meters in width and heigh...
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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