Your Daily Zen Tripout - 04: McGurk’s Sound Illusion (seeing and hearing what we want to, and not what is)

in #ydzto6 years ago (edited)


source. fair use.


I remember once, around 7 years ago now, waiting to receive a text message from a friend on my mobile device. I had been waiting eagerly, anticipating a great hangout with a friend (a “friend” I actually happened to be quite enamored by, at the time). Buzz! Buzzzz! My phone began to vibrate in my pocket. I took it out and sure enough saw my friend’s name at the top of the screen, with the little envelope icon under it. But then something weird happened. When I opened the mail, it wasn’t from this friend at all, but from another acquaintance. Confused, I checked the sender’s name again. Sure enough, it was not the girl I had a crush on. How did I see her name on the message when it arrived!?! The answer? I had wanted to, and expected to. I hallucinated my own “reality”!

The same can happen with sound. Watch the video at the top and close your eyes. You will hear the sounds “ba ba, ba ba.” Now open your eyes. Watch the video again. You will hear ”da da, da da.” Why? Because the actually silent video shows a man mouthing the shape of the sound “da,” while the actual audio track of the video is the sound “ba.” Your brain gets confused by the two signals and attempts to reconcile the audio with what it looks like the man is saying. Welcome to the matrix!

~*~

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I love this clip. We were exposed to this mind trick in college. My prof there loved optical illusions, mind tricks, and other related things.

In terms of Buddhism, I was first exposed to this idea years ago. My buddhist teacher at the time asked me to go outside and find a 4 leaf clover. Up to this point I had never found one before, but I also had never really looked. So I went outside and looked over the clover patches I saw for a few minutes and couldn't find any. I went to him and reported as much. He smiled in his way and went out with me and almost instantly found not one but a few 4 leaf clovers.

"How", I asked?

"Because you don't expect to find any," He explained, "and so even if your eyes happen to come directly upon one, your mind will edit it out when it reports the image back to you and as a result you don't see what is right in front of your face"

Lesson: What we "see" is not reality, but what our minds decide is important, which is based entirely on our stereotypes and preconceptions.

This is not a controversial idea in psychology. It is well accepted there that the "reality" we see is actually a highly edited picture, first narrowed down by our eyes or ears, and then further edited by our minds to only show us what our minds consider important.

I consider shoshin to be the single most important idea in Zen. Long ago I learned to apply that, and now I too can usually find 4 (and 5 and 6) leaf clovers very quickly.

Interesting. I always have trouble finding them as well. 今度は初心でやって見る👁!^_^

Man .. very strange, I may have to use this video in a later post .. I will of course give you a shout out when/if I do .. in my mind the vast majority of people are living in an externally created artificial reality. That's not to say the world is artificial, but because we are born into an externally created perceptual download that defines the boundaries of our reality, our perception of it is.

Ah for sure man. It’s not my video anyway! Amazing though, yeah?

Yes it's mad .. thanks for loading it!

Asked my wife to close her eyes and tell me what she heard: Tada-ba-Ta-da-ba-ba. I'm confused beyond matrix.

wow just done this with my eldest daughter, freakin weird and slightly worrying too. Thanks for the trip xx

Haha, I know, right? :) Freaked me the f*** out in college! But also filled me with wonder...

really sir its sound illusion....when close eyes then sound ba ba ba , when open eyes then da da da.

its really awesome sound making sir @kafknarchy84

Weird, right!?

really awesome sound...

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