5.9.2. How It Works (2)
Yes, right, but also no. Strictly speaking, both audio streams do still come from the same place, but remember that we’re not very good at telling where sounds come from. We’re so poor at it, we prefer to use what we see to figure out the origin of sounds instead [Hack #53] . When you look at the screen, the lip movements of the talking head are so synchronized with one of the audio streams that your brain convinces itself that the audio stream must be coming from the position of the screen too.
It’s whether the video is in the same place as the amplifier that counts in this experiment. When the screen is in a different place from the amplifier, your brain makes a mistake and mislocates one of the audio streams, so the audio streams are divided and you can tune in one and out the other.
Never mind that the reason the conversations can be tuned into separately is because of a localization mistake; it still works. It doesn’t matter that this localization was an illusionthe illusion could still be used by the brain to separate the information before processing it. All our impressions are a construction, so an objectively wrong construction can have as much validity in the brain as an objectively correct construction.
5.9.3. End Note
Driver, J. (1996). Enhancement of selective listening by illusory mislocation of speech sounds due to lip-reading. Nature, 381, 66-68.
Taken from : Mind Hacks
