[dredmorbius]

One of may favourite instances of an optical illusion ever is this short video of a cat pouncing on a sheet of paper on which shows an apparent-motions spirals illusion.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=S4IHB3qK1KU

It reveals that at least this aspect of feline and human visual perception appears to be similar.

As a means of getting inside a cat's head, it's never failed to fascinate me.

There's another ... perceptual phenomenon is probably a better description than illusion ... contained in an episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. In it, a short snippet of noise is played. It sounds completely random. After a cue is heard ... the noise resolves to a comprehensible message.

In my case, I'd started listening to the podcast whilst falling asleep. I don't recall consciously hearing the cue ... but ... when I replayed the podcast the next day, I could understand the audio clip on the first play. I'd "crossed over to the other side* without even consciously hearing the cue.

(I've looked for the episode in the archives listing. I cannot find it though I think it may turn up.)

https://youarenotsosmart.com/all-posts/

[dredmorbius]

Found it, episode 103, "Desirability Bias"

Mind, after several months of not having heard that episode ... I understood the audio immediately.

Audio: https://youarenotsosmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/103-... (mp3)

Episode: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/07/20/yanss-103-desirabili...

When David McRaney says "savour that feeling, because there is no going back", believe him. There really isn't.

The clip, and the reveal, are at the beginning of the episode.

[lisper]

Funny, I was able to wring some sense out of it on second hearing just because I was primed to expect that there was something there. But it turned out not to be quite the right answer. Now that I have heard the big reveal, I can actually hear it both ways, my original, (slightly) mistaken interpretation, and the actual answer.

But it occurs to me that this is exactly how humans learn language. We start by hearing an idealized version, carefully enunciated by parents and primary school teachers, and then we generalize that to more sloppy, noisy renderings in real-life situations, movies, podcasts...

So this experience is reproducible in the large: listen to a foreign language. It's noise. Then learn that language and it stops being noise and takes on meaning. Like the small example, ee efshar lachzor yoter lahatchalah. (That's a latinized transliteration of a Hebrew phrase. Figuring out what it means is left as an exercise :-)

[dredmorbius]

bill / pail / mayo

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KiuO_Z2_AD4

[saghm]

Similar to sibling comment, I understood what the noise was immediately, but I have no way of knowing if it's because I was primed by your comment.