not resting on my yannys

There are a couple of interesting things about the whole YANNY vs. LAUREL sound illusion thing that's been sweeping the internet lately, but before we can get to them it is The Law that I give you my opinion on the subject.

I suspect that if you first listen to the clip, as I did, on a mobile phone, then there's a higher likelihood that you'll hear "yanny", since that's the high-frequency bit and phones are generally rubbish at rendering lower-frequency sounds. Also, if you're on a phone, there's a higher chance you'll be somewhere with a bit of ambient noise going on, which may well swamp the low-frequency bits. That was certainly my experience, as I head "yanny" fairly clearly. Well, I suppose what I mean is I didn't hear any trace of "laurel"; I couldn't swear that what I did hear might not have been "yarry" or "yally" as it's weirdly rendered through some sort of speech synthesiser. Which specific version of the clip you listen to may have a bearing as well; mine was off Twitter so had very possibly had the Twitter upload algorithm compress the shit out of it.

Listen to the same sounds via a higher-quality link and on a laptop, though, and you may hear something different, The one near the top of this Guardian article seems about perfectly pitched to my ear, as I can hear either word depending on what I've preset my brain to listen for. If pressed to pick one I'd definitely lean towards "laurel", though. There are a couple of clips further down featuring some pitch-shifting which illustrate the nature of the illusion quite nicely.

BUT that's not the interesting bit. Too right it wasn't, you might say, at which point I would cordially invite you to - in the words of the great Lester Bangs - eat a bowl of fuck.

The first interesting thing is what this sort of thing - that is to say the laurel/yanny thing and the disagreement over what colour the dress was - reveals in terms of people's reactions to the disagreement. People more inclined to an authoritarian mindset get quite agitated by these things and tend to react with some variant of YOU ARE LITERALLY STUPID AND/OR INSANE AND/OR LYING IT'S OBVIOUSLY BLUE AND BLACK  HOW CAN YOU SAY ANYTHING ELSE, while those of a more analytical bent will say wow, that's really interesting, I wonder how that happens?

Colour perception in particular is a really interesting thing and another good antidote to inflexible thinking. It's important and healthy to realise that having colour boundaries going blue-green-yellow rather than, say, bleen-grellow is completely arbitrary and can vary between cultures, just as the convention that says we have a different name for "light red" (i.e. "pink") but not for "light blue" is completely arbitrary. Maybe it derives from the need to distinguish between things that are roughly the same colour as blood and things that aren't, just to avoid overlooking a medical emergency, but equally maybe that's just bollocks.

Anyway, personally I saw the dress as white and gold and continue to do so even though I know the dress is actually blue and black. Similarly I have never been able to see magic eye images even though I accept that they do exist, as tempting as it is to imagine that the whole thing is a conspiracy designed to waste my time by making me sit in front of swirly pictures making myself go boss-eyed. That one isn't down to colour perception so much, though, and I suppose my own known and medically-documented optical defects (I'm long-sighted) may have a bearing on it.

Now that we've got onto more general optical illusions I can throw in the one that prompted this blog post in the first place. I won't say anything about the specifics until the next paragraph, as it's so good I don't want to spoil it for you. Click here, read the article and look at the images IN ORDER and then come back.

As with all illusions, some will "see it" (although of course the trick here is "not seeing it", at least at first) and some won't. As the author says, though, the really interesting thing is to go back to the original image after "seeing it" and be unable to "unsee it", and, moreover, wonder how you failed to see it in the first place as the visual cues seem so obvious. I think that's one of the best illusions I've ever seen for precisely that reason: everything's there in plain sight.

An almost more interesting question, though, is: was the picture specifically taken to provide an illusion? Or was it just an accident? And given that the person taking it, and the person circulating it as an illusion (assuming they weren't the same person) could by definition "see" it, who was it that realised it'd make a good optical illusion, and how could they know, given the impossibility of "unseeing" it? Did they just say to a friend, look, here's a picture I took of a cigar sticking out of a wall, cool, huh? and have the friend go: hunh? WHAT cigar? Or, if it was specifically designed from the outset, who thought (and why) hey, I know what: if I take a picture of a cigar sticking out of a wall I bet people won't be able to see it? Wait, let me get my camera. And a cigar.