Richard Wiseman and Simon Singh do a great bit in some of their presentations, demonstrating how easy it is to make someone hear just what you want them to hear simply through suggestion. (I’ve seen both guys use this, so I’m not positive who developed it but I’m willing to let them mud wrestle over it [naked]. WAIT, EDIT: I’ve just been informed the originator is Chris French! Thanks, Sid.) They play Stairway to Heaven backwards, and it’s all garbled. Then they play it again, this time giving you lyric to read along — the second time, you can actually hear words. It’s interesting to compare this to electronic voice phenomena (EVP), where “ghost hunters” record garbled nonsense and claim to hear the dead telling them to bite the purple banana (or whatever). Then of course it can also be extended to show you how gullible even the most skeptical brain can be.
All that is to say, here’s another fun example I found on a friend’s Facebook, starring Joe Cocker.
Whenever I see a video of Joe Cocker, not only am I reminded of how good John Belushi’s impression was, I’m also reminded that Belushi actually underplayed the man’s tics and quirks…sweet fancy wonder loaf.
LoL… That’s so awesome.
That was high-larious.
Backwards Speaking was also the subject of Brian Dunning’s last Skeptoid. That episode was so awesome I had to listen to it twice in a row, and then I replayed it for a friend.
arthwollipot beat me the Skeptoid reference but I thought I’d include the link
My ex-wife used to think that CCR was singing about the bathroom on the right.
I want some of whatever he’s havin’ … :D
I love that…
Do you have a link to the Stairway video?
I’ll do you one better, and give you the stairway video along with Michael Shermer giving a talk at TED.
(Of course, you could just skip to 9:11, but you shouldn’t)
THANKS!! I especially liked the last bit, and the overall lightheartedness of the talk.
Very cool.
Oh, that was great! I watched to the end too, and I love the remake of the “Nine Million Bicycles” song. :D Thanks for the link.
If you haven’t looked at the TED talks before, I can recommend almost every one of them.
As a sample of a (relatively) random three, Sir Ken Robinson’s ‘School’s kill creativity‘, Anna Deavere Smith’s ‘Four American characters‘ (warning — harrowing) and Clifford Stoll’s ‘ on …everything‘ are a relatively good sample.
Actually, If I had Clifford Stoll as my science teacher, I would have immediately gone out and become a Physicist or never wanted to look at science again. I’m not sure which (the man’s unhinged: he makes klein bottles for goodness’ sake!).
The human mind is especially adept at finding patterns. Unfortunately it is not necessary that the patterns actually exist for use to find them :-). Part of my time in the US Marine Corps was spent in Intelligence. The training I received largely had to do with how to verify that what you think you see/hear is what is actually there.
Pat O
I keep watching this again and laughing. Does it look to anybody else like he falls over a few times between lines of the song? I know it’s probably just the camera motion, but it sure looks funny. :D
Am I the only one who was disappointed with this post? I mean it was a good post, don’t get me wrong, but I read the title as “Adultery Coolness” at first and sweaty, stoned Joe Cocker was really not on my radar…
My understanding of the history is that Wiseman and Singh developed the Led Zep presentation together as part of Theatre of Science.
Shermer’s version is just Wiseman’s slides and words, I don’t know if he credits anyone.
Chris French, I think, was the person who originally started using the example (of course the Zep stuff is old news) in psychology, but the famous presentation is Theatre of Science.
So with the exception of Shermer, it’s a collaborative effort.
Yes.
As I understand it Chris was using the Led Zep clip as an example of EVP and “top-down” processing of auditory information, which I saw featured at a Skeptics in the Pub many a moon ago. It wasn’t as swish, with a couple of overheads used instead of PowerPoint.
Simon Singh asked Chris for permission to use the presentation for The Theatre of Science and the rest, as they say, is history.