Yanny or Laurel? A perspective from the science of mind and brain

I really like the Yanny versus Laurel meme, which exploded yesterday. It helps illustrate some key points about human perception:

  1. In some situations people can differ wildly in their experience of low-level perception.
  2. Active top-down expectations (and other, weirder processes) have a strong effect on low-level perception.

So basically, it’s an auditory version of #ThatDress.

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