Have you ever heard of the McGurk Effect? In 1976, this perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates the interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception was described in a paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald. The phenomenon suggests that speech perception is multimodal; meaning that what you think you’re “hearing” is actually the involvement of multiple senses! The experiement also released incredibly interesting information about the way we “hear.” They demonstrated that if our eyes see one thing and our ears hear a different thing, when sight and sound grapple in our brains, the eyes win. Eyes tell ears what to hear. Not only that, even if your brain knows this is an illusion, you still can’t hear the truth unless you close your eyes. The illusion is that powerful.
Watch the McGurk Effect for yourself and see just how much input we receive for our hearing from our senses of sight and sound.