Your senses are Tricksy! (McGurk effect Edition)

You remember The Gorilla Effect, right?  To remind you (from LiveScience)

The so-called "invisible gorilla" test had volunteers watching a video where two groups of people — some dressed in white, some in black — are passing basketballs around. The volunteers were asked to count the passes among players dressed in white while ignoring the passes of those in black. (To watch the video for yourself, click here.)

The point being that what you see may not necessarily be what actually happened - something the the New Jersey supreme court took into consideration when they made it much easier for defendants to challenge "eye-witness testimony" last August.  From the New York Times

The State Supreme Court’s ruling was seen as significant because it was based in part on an exhaustive study of the scientific research on eyewitness identification, led by a special master, a retired judge, who held hearings and led a review of the literature on the issue. The special master, Geoffrey Gaulkin, estimated that more than 2,000 studies related to the subject had been published since the Supreme Court’s original 1977 decision, the court noted.

“Study after study revealed a troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications,” Chief Justice Rabner wrote. “From social science research to the review of actual police lineups, from laboratory experiments to DNA exonerations, the record proves that the possibility of mistaken identification is real.

“Indeed, it is now widely known that eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country.”

Scientific American sheds a bit more light on this in their latest issue, when they point out that its not just that your senses are inaccurate - they depend on each other to a much greater extent than was previously understood.  (paywall. sigh)

Exhibit A in this would be The McGurk Effect - a phenomenon where a speaker sez. one thing, you are shown an image of him/her saying something else, and what you hear is an entirely different sound!
A video is better than a thousand words - take a peek at the following video from BBC. 


The wacky part is, you can't "untrain" yourself, you will always hear the wrong thing!
Freaky, innit?