When the Senses Deceive Us

When the Senses Deceive Us

Mozammel Hosain Toha

There is no guarantee that everything we see or hear in real life is actually correct. Most of the time, our senses deceive us. For example, think about watching television. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that when we’re watching a football game or any other event and hear the commentator’s narration, if the commentator appears on screen, it feels like the words are coming directly from their mouth. But when the camera shows the players instead, it becomes clear from the narration that the sound is actually coming from the TV speakers. In this case, our eyes fool our ears.

Now consider songs in movies. Usually, the actors and actresses do not sing themselves; the actual singing is done by professional artists, and the actors just lip-sync. If you have a lot of experience watching movies, you may have noticed that unless the singer is famous, it’s hard for us to realize what’s happening. It feels as if the actors themselves are singing. But if the song is performed by a well-known singer, whose voice we can identify immediately, then no matter how perfectly the actors synchronize their lips, the song starts to feel out of place. We constantly feel that it isn’t the actor or actress who’s singing, but someone else. In this case, our ears deceive our eyes.

The main reason behind such incidents lies in a region of the brain less than half an inch in diameter, known to scientists as the Inferior Colliculus Region. This part acts as a sort of station for all sound waves traveling from the ear to the cortex (the brain’s central processing area). It works with both auditory and visual information simultaneously. According to scientists, visual and auditory information is encoded in the brain in similar ways, which is why our senses often influence each other.

On this topic, Jennifer Groh, an associate professor at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, says that where we focus our vision is very important for hearing. Meanwhile, Christoph Kayser, a researcher at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, says that these kinds of events demonstrate that the brain processes information from various senses together as much as possible, rather than keeping them separate.

Magicians use this trait of our brain to create audiovisual illusions in their tricks. Even ventriloquists, in their art of speaking without moving their lips so it seems the sound is coming from somewhere else, take advantage of this property of the brain. Their skill in speaking without moving their lips and creating different voice frequencies is important, but even more crucial is the way our brain works. Because when our gaze is fixed on the ventriloquist’s fascinating puppet, our brain convinces us that the words originating from the ventriloquist’s mouth are actually coming from the puppet.

Based on “When the Eyes Play Tricks on the Ears” by Nikhil Swaminathan, published in Scientific American.

Read my original article from here – http://tohamh.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/when_the_sensory_organs_make_tricks/

Mozammel Hosain Toha

Sirte – Libya

[email protected] ; http://www.tohamh.tk ; http://tohamh.wordpress.com