THE MCGURK EFFECT.

THE MCGURK EFFECT. I have been claiming for some time now that I am not good at lip reading; Mary Jane is the one who can tell what the disappointed athletes are saying. Apparently I am better at it than I think. I have been introduced to the McGurk Effect. This YouTube from the BBC demonstrates it. When I looked at lips making an “f” sound (“fa—fa—fa—fa”) while listening to an audio of a “d” sound (“da—da—da—da”), I heard the “f” sound. I was instinctively lip reading. Here is a wikipedia article on the McGurk Effect. It was discovered in 1976. It shows that: “The visual information a person gets from seeing a person speak changes the way they hear the sound.” The McGurk Effect results from the brain’s effort “to provide your consciousness with its best guess about what the incoming information is trying to tell it.” Sometimes when confronted with conflicting information from the eye and the ear, the brain processes the information into a third sound (“‘ga’ auditory and ‘ba’ visual produce ‘bga'”). When somebody is watching a dubbed movie, the brain is trying to ignore the visual information.