Excellent auditory illusion: "Bart Simpson bouncing" or "lactating piracy?"

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Originally published at: Excellent auditory illusion: "Bart Simpson bouncing" or "lactating piracy?" | Boing Boing

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if you close your eyes and only listen its “that is embarrassing”, albeit with an english accent.

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It sounded like whatever line of dialog i was reading. Kinda freaky.

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And just like the visual illusions once the “true” value is revealed you can’t get back to the original false certainty. Initially i heard the distinct aspirated consonant puffed B of “Bart simpson bouncing” but reading “It’s really ‘that is embarrassing’” now i can’t return to ‘bart’. …interesting, thankee.

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This will be my excuse for why I often has such a hard time figuring out the dialogue on TV.

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I hear it is a white dress…

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So it is less an auditory illusion and more a local accent that is easier to understand if you are from the right areas of Britain?

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I was listening to them chant “lattés in Marcy,” thinking it’s the second chant which will contain “embarrassing” when I suddenly, for a brief moment, was able to do the mental gymnastics required for this Californian to hear “that is embarrassing.” Good-bye, Marcy.

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If our eyes cannot be convinced that we are all perceiving the same image, then there’s no way our ears can be convinced about what we hear; hell, there are certain frequencies that all people can’t even detect once they pass a certain age.

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I’m not from Britain, but having enjoyed a range of British media, I can clearly hear “this is embarrassing”…

…unless I stare at some of the other captions while I listen, and then I start to hear the words I’m staring at. That feels weird to me, but it’s true. It doesn’t work for every phrase in the picture, but reading some of the words seems to change what I hear.

It’s some sort of odd mental trick, I think, like the way people get confused about colors when you see red letters spelling out blue.

Tl;dr: humans are weird! :woman_shrugging: :rofl:

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i hear “that is embarrassing” pretty clearly, though “lactating piracy” is feasible, and like others have mentioned, i can get most of the others (not all) by looking at the phrases written out

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I think this one is easier than the older examples because the phrase is repeated several times, with slight inevitable variations, that make it more clear as you “average” the variations into a clear favorite.

The other “yanni/laurel” memes have repeated the same exact sound over and over.

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This kind of reminds me of the video on youtube of “O Fortuna” as misheard lyrics: https://youtu.be/nIwrgAnx6Q8

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Bells, frogs, big cherries

Peter Pan, Magic cheese

Bells, frogs, big cherries,

Peter Pan, Magic cheese

Sephiroth

Sephiroth

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I have some weirdnesses with my hearing because I was partially deaf until I was 5. When I came out of the hospital after surgery I was confused because I had never heard birds singing before, I just assumed they flew around silently.

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Definitely saying Lactating Morrissey.

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I hear “here we are now, entertain us.”

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That not this.

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Not forgetting Grover’s classic “a fucking excellent idea”:

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If I were stoned, there would be untold perceptions of this odd cacaphony, “This is embarrassing… This isn’t Boston… This is embossing…”

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