Monday, June 14, 2010

When Hearing and Seeing Conflict

When someone with average hearing and sight gets conflicting information through each sense which one does the brain trust?

Researchers say if you have people count the number of times a light flashes while listening to beeping tones, they’ll assume the light flickered as many times as the beeping occurred – even when they are not the same number. When it’s an issue of timing and the brain has to make sense of similar information delivered in a sequence, the brain counts on hearing.

However, when it’s a question of an image conflicting with a sound, the visual wins out. If an actor in a film appears to say “bah” but the sound track is “dah” people will swear they heard “bah.”