Noam Hassenfeld

So I talked to Diana Deutsch, who's this psychology professor at UC San Diego.

And she likes to study all these weird ways our brain edits the world.

These weird kind of audio glitches.

She loves to research audio illusions.

Laurel.

Yes, exactly.

Oh, okay.

It's exactly Laurel Yanny.

One of these allusions I love is called the octave illusion.

I wonder if I can play it for you.

Tell me what you hear.

Low on one side, high on the other, right?

Okay, I hear the exact same thing.

The issue is that there is a low note and a high note on each side.

Each ear is getting low, high, low, high, low, high.

They're overlaid over each other.

You think you're just getting low one ear, high in the other, but you're actually getting two sequences of low, high.

And the reason you only hear low in one side and high in the other is that your brain is editing the sequence for you.

Because your brain needs to separate sounds to make sense of them, right?

It has to separate that blobby waveform to pull out the words or the bird song.