If you thought Yanni versus Laurel was mind blowing,
You ain't seen, -or should I say, you ain't heard- nothing yet.
Because this auditory illusion that popped up in the wake of Yanni vs. Laurel is so much better! Unlike (Yanni/Laurel)
Most people can actually switch between what they're hearing with this one. In fact, the effect here is so strong,
You'll never be able to trust your own senses again.
So even if you have heard of this one before stick around because to analyze the truth of what's going on in this one
We're gonna be unwrapping a whole slew of other illusions that prove just how lazy and easy to manipulate our brains actually are
First just listen don't go down in the comments yet
What did you just hear? Did you hear this word?
Or did you hear this?
Now try switching between them by focusing on one word at a time
If everything's going according to plan you should be able to switch between them based on which word you have
currently in your vision and now here's the original video which as you watch it should actually
strengthen your perception of green needle
but here's the kicker, what's actually being said here is
Brainstorm, that's the character's name from the show Ben 10 where this toy originates, but how all this works is gonna blow your mind
Um blow your ears. Wait, no. No that just sounds painful. Anyway. Hello Internet. Welcome to (distorted) Film Theory.
The show that's entirely justified in covering this topic today since I sometimes cover the science,
psychology and lore of YouTube videos
So by this point, I'm sure we're all familiar and totally sick of the Yanni/Laurel debate right?
"Laurel" or "Yanni"
The last stats I saw 47% of people were able to hear Yanni and 53% were able to hear Laurel
Let me give you another shot here. Honestly for the life of me
I can only hear Laurel until of course you start pitch shifting it and honestly, that's my big problem with this auditory illusion
Most people are stuck only hearing one of the two
And they have a really hard time hearing the other one without some kind of big change
Whereas most people are able to switch between the Brainstorm/Green Needle audio pretty darn easily.
In fact, I can even control for you.
I don't even have to show the words!
How cool is this?!
But, here's the best part
Unlike the Yanni/Laurel where the final explanation about what was really going on was quite honestly kinda boring talking about higher and lower
Frequencies being overlaid and different sound qualities coming out of different speakers blah blah blah
"YAWN"
The reasons behind why we experience the Brainstorm/Green Needle auditory illusion actually reveal a lot about how our brains
function, how lazy they are and how unreliable our senses can be.
So get ready to start distrusting yourself,
'cuz here we go.
To begin scientists would classify the Brainstorm/Green Needle illusion as an example of what's known as: Bistable perception
Where a stimulus is just too ambiguous for human senses to process with only one interpretation.
These are the sorts of illusions that allow you to switch between how you're seeing them
In the case of our Ben Ten friend,
it's how you're able to hear...
On one play through and...
Just as well on a second play through,
But auditory illusions like this are incredibly rare.
Most Bistable stimuli are visual; like the Schroeder staircase
Where you can either see the staircase going up into the left,
or you could see an upside-down staircase going down into the right.
There's the all-time classic; faces versus vases
or you can always go with the Internet's favorite; the twirly girly
Where as you watch:
You can actually see her spinning in one direction and then all of a sudden out of the blue, she'll just switch directions
scientific surveys have shown that most people start seeing a rotating clockwise.
a 65/35 split, but I swear, I swear. I never could see her going anything but counter-clockwise.
Until actually working on this episode,
then I just use the arrow keys to have YouTube jump forwards and backwards by 5 seconds,
to break the flow of the image briefly,
suddenly I was able to see it moving in both ways. It is crazy!
So if uh you're like me and having trouble seeing it rotating in the opposite direction,
try that, I'll give you a few seconds to buffer.
Well, I deliver you a musical interlude.
"Music"
Oh and uh by the way,
don't believe online articles that say which direction you see are spinning determines your:
"dominant brain hemisphere".
Or it's an indicator of:
"How smart you are"
Science has actually debunked all of that
What are the other interesting wrinkles of Brainstorm/Green Needle is that it's a: Crossmodal problem.
Which means that it involves multiple different senses: hearing and sight.
Yanni vs. Laurel is just auditory.
You see,
our brains are constantly piecing together bits of information,
from all of our senses to form solid ideas of objects and events in the world around us.
Usually these pieces of information complement and confirm each other.
Thereby improving the reliability of our perception.
But when things don't match up in the way that the brain expects,
that's gonna get some weird results
Here's one of my all-time favorites; the Motion-Bounce illusion.
Watch these two balls pass through each other,
nothing super remarkable right?
Now watch it again.
Did the balls pass through each other again, or did they bounce off of each other?
Watch them bounce again.
It's the exact same thing I showed you the first time,
but your brain perceives the balls bouncing off each other,
because the sound triggers it to think that there was some sort of collision happening
It's using past experience of balls coming together,
coupled with a sound that it's hearing to inform what you're seeing,
and it's telling you that you should be seeing a collision,
and your perception adjusts accordingly.
The same is true for this next illusion:
How many times you see Deadpool's face appear on screen?
Twice right? Let's try it again
Twice again.
Now, let's slow it way down while keeping the sound in
You see that it only happens once,
this phenomenon is called: the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion.
Where the sound was Influencing what you were seeing happening on screen.
So again, we get an example of a: Crossmodal illusion.
Where our sense of hearing is affecting our perception of sight,
and it's not just limited to those two senses, both hearing and sight can affect touch too.
Take for instance: the Marble Hand illusion.
Which is pretty darn wild.
Scientists hit participants hands with a small hammer while playing a noise,
the noise starts off as just the sound of a hammer hitting skin,
but it slowly transitions to the sound of a hammer hitting marble,
and get this across the board,
the test subjects reported their hand feeling heavier, stiffer and harder,
but if you think that was crazy on its own get this.
The test also showed their skin conductance,
or the electrical conductivity of their skin,
also went down, just like you would see out of an object made of stone.
Crazy! Now admittedly, It's a bit difficult to smack your hand with a hammer over the Internet,
so instead, let's try something else: put on headphones and start rubbing your hands together like this in: 3, 2, 1
Felt pretty normal, right? Alright, let's try it again in: 3, 2, 1
Your hands should have felt moister that time did they now
Stop rubbing those gross moist hands of yours. And let's try one more time in 3 2 1
There that should have helped dry them off for you
This phenomenon is called the parchment hand Elysian where sound is directly
influencing your sense of touch you are
Basically feeling the feelings that the sounds are telling you to feel feels pretty good and wet and moist and sticky which is just kind
Of weird sure all this is fun and games. But how do all these cross-modal illusions apply to brainstorm and green needle?
well
look at the original video notice how the podium flashes three times even though the toy is officially saying
Brainstorm the word brainstorm is only two syllables, but we're seeing three flashes from the toy
Which seems like they should coincide with the syllables that we're hearing
Our brain is looking to hear a three syllable phrase that'll match up with the cadence of those
Flashes and the phrase that best matches is green needle or other things that are kind of close
But obviously that can't be the whole story here because as I demonstrated at the top of the episode you are able to hear both
brainstorm and
green needle without me ever showing you a video clip all it took was hearing the audio and seeing the words and this is perhaps
the biggest differentiator with yani versus Laurel because no amount of me showing you Yanni on screen while playing the audio
Is gonna get you to hear it if you can't already?
well
It turns out that one of the major reasons we hear and are able to switch between the words
Brainstorm and green needle is because of the psychological process of priming where your brain gets
Preconditioned into one thought pattern and thus tries to fit new stimuli into the pattern moving forward for instance
Let me talk to you about how much I love
Showers, now that might seem a bit weird for me to talk about right now, but sometimes I just can't help it
I love talking about and taking showers. I love getting clean. I love washing my hair. I like singing and thinking in the shower
I love
I love the shower. I also got a confession. I love washing my hands in the sink
I use Old Spice and water or dove and water mostly but sometimes I've been feeling particularly wild and slippery
I'm not opposed to the occasional Irish
Spring and water but enough about my bathing and hygiene habits
If I were to ask you to complete this word that you see on screen right now
What would you say most people at this point should say soap thanks to the effect of priming specifically associative priming
I got you thinking in the pattern of
bathrooms and washing
Which makes you much more likely to see those letters and think so rather than things like step stop
C for any of the other words that fit that pattern think about
Associative priming like a web with each word as its own node in that web
I activated all of the words around soap without actually saying soap itself
So when presented with the opportunity to fill in that word your brain jumped at the chance
But priming can also have some unexpected consequences too. For instance
Stereotypes are actually a form of psychological priming one of the most extreme examples to show this came from a study by ship tin
Ski and embody where they took Asian American women and gave them a math test sucks to be subjects in that study
now the generally believed stereotype for those who have Asian descent is that they're great at math and
Conversely the stereotype for women is that they're worse in math than men. Hey, don't shoot the messenger
I'm not the one who said it it's society. Okay, take it up with
Society you probably already have on Twitter somewhere
Anyway in the test one group was primed to focus on their Asian identity and the other was primed to focus on their female
Identity and get this the group who is primed with the positive stereotype
Outperformed the control group while the one who was primed with the negative stereotype performed worse
Now when it comes to brainstorm versus green needle when you choose to focus on one of the two words on screen
To try and switch what you're hearing that's direct priming in action
You're using visual stimuli to trigger your brain into thinking along a certain pattern and what you hear is affected accordingly
Honestly, if I were to say brain need and then show you the words brain needle and then play the clip for you
There's probably a pretty strong likelihood that you just heard brain needle and that isn't even one of our options
It's priming in its prime. You've been primed in a way that the yeah Neil oral auditory illusion could never do so in short?
I hope today's episode proved two things for you. First that your senses are actually completely unreliable
We can't count on our brains to tell us anything accurately
I mean think about it every
second your brain is trying to make sense of all your sensory inputs to create a mental map of the world around you the
Processing power this takes is immense estimated to be up to the equivalent of a hundred million MIPS
That's a hundred million million instructions per second
If your brain were built like a standard computer
so your brain comes up with all sorts of shortcuts to help you quickly sort and categorize things and patterns tactics like
Priming means that we don't have to consciously look at every item in a room and rack our brains for a definition
We just instantly know that a chair is a chair is a chair
Despite all three of those things looking fairly different from each other and secondly look on the upside the next time one of these controversial
mystery videos hits YouTube and the rest of social media heart
You'll know the secrets behind why everyone's losing their collective online shorts and you'll be able to be the person to set the record straight
Instead of shaming people because they're too old to hear the right word. We're going on a rage-fueled bender in the comments section
You'll be able to tackle the next magic video craze armed with the knowledge that all of our brains have a little bit of faulty
Wiring and that using just a little bit of science we can trick them into seeing and hearing and feeling all
Sorts of crazy and explicable things except they're totally splittable
We just split them remember that our brains are doing a lot of work all the time
So they're always looking for ways to be lazier and work more efficiently
Now you're armed with the knowledge that the illusions we cover today are all examples of what happens when things slip through the cracks
Unfortunately, after watching this episode, you've also realized that you've been primed to click on the subscribe button as soon as I say
But hey, that's just a theory a film theory
and
Actually for being a hundred percent honest
It's more likely that you've been primed to just click to another video when I say those words
but hey a click on the subscribe button would be really nice and really appreciated and
Cut
Hiya! Go subscribe to MatPat and the closed captioners! We all worked super hard to provide this for you and we'd all appreciate it! Have a good day! -Amelia ;Thanks!  -Michael
