Seeing is Believing: The McGurk Effect
Ever said that?
We tend to believe everything we see with our own eyes – but – I have already shown in a previous article that given the amount of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis, sometimes our eyes deceive us: because we only see what we want to see (confirmation bias) and often miss things that are right in front of our eyes due to the same cognitive biases.
In that article (‘Filters: Every Story Is Incomplete… & What To Do About It’) I shared with you the rather cool gorilla experiment and here I have another fascinating short (3 min) video to share with you.
Our brains are incredible at filling in gaps – sometimes too clever for their own good. For example when there is a conflict between two modalities – check out what happens when what our eyes see conflicts with what we hear:
Answer: Our eyes win.
We really do believe what we see.
Even when we know that what our eyes are telling us is wrong, particularly when it comes to cognitive speech recognition, we can’t help processing the information according to what we see over and above what we hear.
This concept is known as The McGurk Effect.
Final Thought – What To Do With This Information
As with a better understanding of how our memories can deceive us, how our filters provide us an incomplete story and other biases I’ve written about in previous articles, knowledge is power.
That is to say, knowing that these concepts exist, you can test your own biases, you can question more and generally just be less ‘wedded’ to a given position.
The goal here is to understand our views of the world, to accept our limitations and to be more open-minded with ourselves and with others.
Yep, you’re right. Fascinating.
Hey Sonia,
thanks for commenting – glad you liked it!