I like Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast. Its scripted, and you can tell, but it is very well researched and you can read the scripts online. Today he’s talking about reverse speech, which is one of those aural apophenia-type things (or, more technically pareidolia). Like hearing ghost voices in white noise — or seeing Jesus in the taco, for that matter — you’re making connections that just aren’t there. You get our what you put into it.
In this case, reverse speech advocates claim it is a way of looking into your subconscious. Dunning comes up with a reference I haven’t seen before (…if it is new to me…) that, while it might not explain the perceived phenomena, could help shade how we look at its practitioners.
The journal Science published an article in 1981 by Remez, Rubin, Pisoni, and Carrell called Speech perception without traditional speech cues. By playing what they called a “three-tone sinusoidal replica”, or a complicated sine wave sound, they found that people were able to perceive speech, when in fact there were no traditional speech sounds present in the signal. So rather than laughing at a reverse speech advocate, instead appreciate the fact that there is good science driving their perception of what they’re hearing. They’re not making anything up, they’re just unaware of the natural explanation for their phenomenon.
It is something of a theme — ooh, ooh, a pattern — that I’ve seen in recent years, where popular paranormal topics are given physiological explanations. That is, when we see shadow people, experience an out-of-body sensation, or believe we have past lives…it could be just faulty wiring in the brain. Not a mental problem, per se, just a epiphenomena of the way we’re put together, like blind spots.