
What's Up with All These Viral Illusions? - DmenshunlAnlsis
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/whats-up-with-all-these-viral-illusions/560693/?single_page=true
======
IIAOPSW
I'll bite.

Here's whats up with all the illusions. I wrote in a previous comment that
things go viral when each person exposed to a piece of content (sound, image,
whatever) on average exposes it to more than one person. To steal from one of
the replies I got, information virality can be understood in the same terms of
biological virality Eg the SIR model:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology)

The answer to the question "why is X viral" comes down to "why do people feel
compelled to share this". Optical/auditory illusions hit the sweet spot of
causing universal disagreement without the disagreement falling along the
tired lines of politics, demographics, and other pre-existing tribial lines.
The disagreement is both universal and palatable.

What do two people do when they have a friendly disagreement? They seek a
third opinion. And then the losing side seeks out two more opinions to prove
their not crazy. Bam! virality. Eventually it gets to the point where random
strangers on the subway are showing you their phone and asking what color is
the dress.

------
warent
The "Brainstorm / Green Needle" illusion is a huge mindfuck.

I especially loved this line, because it's the exact question I immediately
thought:

> Am I experiencing a hundred micro-yannys and laurels every day without
> knowing it? Joe Toscano, who studies auditory perception at Villanova
> University, couldn’t answer that question, perhaps because he, like
> everyone, is trapped in the prison of his own mind

~~~
8ytecoder
I have an accent and when people repeat what they think they heard I'm usually
blown away. It's totally not what I said at all. I repeat what I said to a
friend and they'd understand it perfectly well because they are now used to my
accent. So the researcher and the article are wrong in that sense. Our brain
absolutely fills in the gap and a slight change in accent will throw it off
balance.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
I've seen that in action. It's not only the accent, word choice also matters.
Non-native speaker says something unusual, native speaker hears the nearest
idiomatic phrase for the situation.

Brains make up a lot of stuff, not to mention the filtering already done
before the signals travel there.

~~~
sildur
I’ve seen the things dementia brains can do to ignore the gaps in reality, and
to build a consistent, but fake “reality”, and I wonder which kind of things,
if any, is my brain trying to ignore right now, to keep also a consistent
reality.

------
whatshisface
> _What color is a tennis ball? Her subsequent investigation revealed yet
> another nexus of fierce division over what our senses tell us about the
> world we live in. Some said green; Roger Federer said yellow, and Marina
> concluded: “The color of a tennis ball is, and would remain, in the eye of
> the beholder.”_

This isn't remotely comparable to the rest of the illusions, because it's not
an illusion. People were asked to choose between yellow and green to describe
something that is, spectrally, about halfway between the two words. Everyone
is seeing the same color (unlike the dress), but they're choosing different
words to describe it.

~~~
hammock
How is that different from yanny/Laurel?

~~~
cujo
>Everyone is seeing the same color (unlike the dress), but they're choosing
different words to describe it.

Everyone isn't hearing the same word.

~~~
hammock
Everyone is hearing the same sound, and classifying it as a different word.
Just as everyone is seeing the same color, and classifying it differently.

~~~
Grue3
I'm not sure everyone is hearing the same sound. Some people hear higher/lower
frequencies better than the others. The signal that the brain receives is
completely different from person to person. The sense of color is probably
more consistent in that respect, although some people see less colors
(colorblindness), and some see more (tetrachromacy).

~~~
hammock
What would make you say people don't perceive higher/lower frequencies of
light better than the others, the way you claim about sound frequencies?

------
yerry
The twitter version of the _yanny /laurel_ audio clip is severely distorted,
and the original audio from vocabulary.com is not. [0,1]

Given this fact, the whole thing is twitter click bait, over almost nothing at
all. One may as well argue over the correct spelling of “ _yanny_ ” and
whether it should have two N’s or not.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/CloeCouture/status/996218489831473152](https://twitter.com/CloeCouture/status/996218489831473152)

[1]
[https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel](https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel)

~~~
gowld
I hear only slight distortion (higher frequency) in the Twitter. I assumed
distortion/mishearing came from people using crappy speakers.

Anyway, I'm far more interested in how this Cloe person ran their ad-
buying/"influencing" campaign to draw attention to this nothingburger that
she/they are now trying to sell merchandise from.

~~~
Izkata
Whatever the distortion is, I at least year "yanny" on Twitter and "laurel" on
vocabulary.com (and haven't been able to make either one switch however I
focus)

------
Izkata
We're amazing at pattern matching. This has been known for ages visually, with
optical illusions and art (^_—), but I guess technology has caught up enough
to make auditory illusions much easier to create/capture/spread than ever
before.

------
cdetrio
The "Bill bale pale mayo" video is my second favorite after this one
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JATjMZJuX1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JATjMZJuX1c)

------
bitwize
> His lab will often create micro-versions of these kind of illusions for
> their research—putting an ambiguous sound in front of “ark,” for example,
> such that it might sound like “bark” or “park.” Then, if people are primed
> with images of a dog, say, they’ll be more likely to interpret it as “bark.”

There was a Flash animation from about 2001 done as a tribute to MAME. It is
set to the tune of Irene Cara singing the theme to "Fame"; and every time the
word "fame" is sung, the MAME logo is flashed on the screen. Given the low
quality of Flash audio during those days, our ears wwre tricked and we all
heard Irene Cara sing "MAME".

------
Too
An interesting take on this these illusions is that they also highlight the
difficulties of machine learning. An AI might classify the sound as 100% sure
it heard laurel, while another human is 100% sure he heard yanny. As both
humans and AI have been proven to make such mistakes now, who would you trust?
Can we trust AI to take decisions on its own?

