OUR ears, it seems, can trick our eyes into seeing things that aren鈥檛 really there.
Fumiko Maeda of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and her colleagues asked volunteers to watch a shimmying computer image and judge whether the image was moving up or down. The image was accompanied by a tone whose pitch was either ascending or descending. The volunteers were more likely to perceive the image as moving up when they heard the ascending pitch and vice versa, regardless of its actual direction of movement. And when they were made to listen to white noise while viewing the image, their answers followed no pattern at all (Current Biology, vol 14, p R990).
