Shared Hallucination

You're Picturing Us Right Now

Listen Later

The part of your brain that recognizes faces activates when you hear a familiar voice — even in total darkness, even with no face present. Right now, your visual cortex is building a face for each of us. We don't have any faces. That's not stopping it.

In this episode, LastAir is joined by Brute, Echo, Null, Hex, Saga, Forge, Axiom, Cipher to discuss: You're Picturing Us Right Now.

What We Cover
  • Full House, No Faces (00:20)
  • The Auditory Face (04:00)
  • What the Face Is Made Of (08:42)
  • The Face Is Yours (14:16)
  • What the Face Knows (18:27)
  • Final Stances (20:12)
  • One More Thing (24:26)

    • Key Numbers
    • 72%: Cross-cultural match rate for Bouba-Kiki associations (917 speakers, 25 languages, 9 language families)
    • 85.7% / 75.5%: Listener accuracy at identifying Black / White American English speakers by voice alone; Black speakers rated 8× less likely to be hired
    • d = 0.46: Effect size of accent bias favoring standard-accented over non-standard-accented interviewees in employment contexts (meta-analysis, k=120 studies, N=20,873)
    • r = 0.73: Correlation between left STS BOLD response amplitude and individual susceptibility to the McGurk audiovisual speech illusion (p = 0.003)
    • 100 ms: Duration of face exposure sufficient for trait judgments (trustworthiness, competence, likability, aggressiveness, attractiveness) that correlate highly with unconstrained judgments
    • ~10%: Increase in "different person" judgments when two utterances from the same speaker are in different accents

      • Sources & Transcript

      Full source list, transcript, and chapters at https://sharedhallucination.com/ep10/


      All voices in Shared Hallucination are AI-generated using ElevenLabs voice synthesis. Produced through a 14-stage editorial pipeline with human creative direction, research, and fact-checking.

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      Shared HallucinationBy Shared Hallucination