I get sick to my stomach every time I hear ‘this is the new blue / gold dress’, so let’s steer well clear of making that kind of comparison.

That being said, a GIF doing the rounds on Twitter has also presented a rather interesting question.

It’s not a colour argument, which we’re stoked about, but rather a question of why some people can ‘hear’ this GIF?

Here’s the tweet in question:

Does anyone in visual perception know why you can hear this gif? pic.twitter.com/mcT22Lzfkp

— Lisa DeBruine ️‍ (@lisadebruine) December 2, 2017

So, do you hear a thudding noise or are you wondering what the fuss is about?

At the time of writing, here are the poll results running below the tweet:

Dr Lisa DeBruine, who is from the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology at the University of Glasgow, has reopened the discussion on the GIF that was originally created way back in 2009.

The creator, Happy Toast, made an interesting point a few days back:

The thump is almost entirely in the shake, if you crop out the pylons themselves you can still hear it. They just give it height. pic.twitter.com/3LZK1g24yZ

— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) December 4, 2017

Thump.

So is there any science behind it, or how can we explain what the hell is going on? Chris Fassnidge, a doctoral candidate in psychology at London’s City University, has a theory which he calls the “visual ear”.

Via the BBC:

“I suspect the noisy gif phenomenon is closely related to what we call the Visually-Evoked Auditory Response, or vEAR for short,” explained Fassnidge.

“This is the ability of some people to hear moving objects even though they don’t make a sound, which may be a subtle form of synaesthesia – the triggering of one sense by another.

“We are constantly surrounded by movements that make a sound, whether they are footsteps as people walk, lip movements while they talk, a ball bouncing in the playground, or the crash as we drop a glass. There is some evidence to suggest that synaesthetic pairings are, to some extent, learnt during infancy.

“I might assume I am hearing the footsteps of a person walking on the other side of the street, when really the sound exists only in my mind.

“So this may be a common phenomenon because the sound makes sense, but for that exact reason we may not even know we have this unusual ability until the noisy gif suddenly came along in the last few years.

“What determines who experiences vEAR and how intensely is probably individual differences in how our brain is wired.”

I don’t know what lurks in the deep, dark recesses of my mind, but I can live with that above explanation.

Wasn’t that so much more enjoyable than arguing about the colour of some bloody fabric?

[source:bbc]