- The reason is that we still think of our senses—sight, hearing, touch—as reflecting the outside world, purely. But they don't. They provide us with a mixture of the world out there and our own expectations.
Couple things they should have gotten into but didn't: 1) Hearing and vision are terribly lossy codecs in humans. Roughly 80% of the information you think you "see" and "hear" are synthesized by your brain based on, as they say, prior information. This is the source of nearly all optical illusions and why we see faces in the moon, etc. Every misinterpreted lyric you've ever heard ("there's a bathroom on the right" in CCR's bad moon rising, etc) is due to this as well. When exposed to new information we pattern-match with what we've seen or heard before. Thus, ghosts, phantom ringtones, etc. 2) They're kinda cheating on the "scrambling." They left most of the consonants in place (I'd be curious to see their algorithm - it sounds like a pitch/amplitude transform which preserves sibilance, plosives and frickatives to a greater extent than vowels) which aids natural born speakers of Germanic tongues. there's a chance that people who grew up speaking any of the Asiatic languages would not attach to the clip the same way because intelligibility in asiatic languages requires the development of different structures in Broca's Area than the structures necessary for Germanic languages. 3) The first time through you don't attach to the consonants because you have no context for them. If, however, you listen to the clip over and over again you will get close eventually, at least if you have training. I heard "next stop" before I knew what I was listening to, but I do this sort of thing for a living.
and the brain has a terrible memory at that. So how much of consciousness is actually real? Our emotions, our passions, our desires... All suspended in delusions, but then reinforced by our sense of "self"... Roughly 80% of the information you think you "see" and "hear" are synthesized by your brain based on, as they say, prior information.
Some good points there, especially about the Mondegreens. Essentially all of this comes back to the fact that our brains are excellent at pattern matching but it is interesting to get such a clear example of how much work our brain does to reconcile the external information presented to it into something that 'fits' our internal world. Its like the sensory equivalent of cognitive bias.
Yeah, in relation to your third point there was a guy in the comments who stated that he had been in aviation for over 50 years. Because of this, he had learnt and heard 'Aviation English' over many a noisey radios. He said he got the phrase completely the second time round it played.
That was neat. I think people too little consider the nature of their perception of the world around them. Like the article says ( and the illusion proves), not only are they made of external stimuli, but also our previous experiences. In addition to this, we inherently can't know what senses we don't have. There could be so much more to the world, or rather a vaster array of interpretations of the world than I care to imagine.
Dat intonation. I need to learn some Mandarin before the imminent onslaught of Chinese world dominance, thanks for reminding me. :)