I heard "end of life as we know it"....
An audiologist has an explanation for why everyone on the internet can’t stop asking: “Yanny” or “Laurel”?
“This all comes down to the brain,” says Dr. Kevin Franck, director of audiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. “The fact that brains go in one way and some brains go in the other means that we’re all just wired a bit differently based on our experiences.”
The viral audio clip — which some listeners interpret as a deep male voice saying, “Yanny,” and others hear as a higher-pitched voiced saying, “Laurel” — popped up on Reddit this week and quickly plunged the internet into fierce debate, the likes of which have not been since 2015’s furor over “the Dress.”
Franck explains that the Yanny vs. Laurel debate likely hits on a number of cognitive processes that the brain uses to assign meaning to sound, though he stresses that he doesn’t know exactly how the file was made. (The New York Times reports that the whole thing can be traced back to an 18-year-old in Georgia who got the clip on Vocabulary.com.)