Even the President of the United States, his daughter and the Vice President are agitated by what they are certain they are hearing and by the fact that about half the population seems to be hearing something completely different! Some people hear ‘Laurel’ some people hear ‘Yanny’. Both groups are listening to the same sound! Laurel and Yanny are two words that sound nothing like each other; and yet this is a phenomenon that is taking the world by storm.
It started on Instagram, moved to Reddit and was picked up by a YouTuber who posted this tweet. The audio consists of a word – about half the people hear laurel and half hear yanny. Some hear both. For instance, when my daughters made me hear this audio last evening I heard yanny. My husband heard laurel and he was convinced I was joking when I said I heard yanny. Then, quite bizarrely, this morning I hear laurel!
Some people hear one or the other, some hear both. Some hear different things at different pitches! Listen to these people in the video – my whole family was like this last evening.
The Laurel or Yanny debate so caught everyone's imagination, that Ivanka Trump, some of Trump’s personal team and several others emphatically opined on what they heard. Or thought they heard. This indicates that this is a real, albeit really bizarre phenomenon. It also seems to indicate that Donald Trump appears to have a hitherto unsuspected sense of humour.
You would hear one or the other, or both! According to experts, priming is one aspect of this phenomenon. Since we are asked which of the words we are hearing, we hear one or the other, in the event such a suggestion was not made, we may hear gibberish. The listener’s age, the pitch, speed of the sounds and the device on which they are hearing the sounds could also impact what you or I hear.
Laurel and Yanny is an auditory cue, the blue/black-white/gold dress was a visual cue that similarly created an internet sensation a few years back.
Half the people swore they saw a blue and black dress, the other half were convinced they were looking at a dress that was white and gold. When people got over being freaked out by the phenomenon, the blue dress controversy led to some important investigations into human colour vision.
Ever since yanny and laurel drove a wedge halfway between the netizens of the world, many explanations of the phenomenon have come out. This video has over 36 million views – it does a pretty good job of explaining the phenomenon and provides evidence of the fact that the most completely inconsequential and trivial of things can fascinate and absorb us to this absurd extent!
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