Is McDonald鈥檚 鈥榮wearing toy鈥 all in your head?
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McDonald鈥檚 swears that the little yellow 鈥淢inions鈥 Happy Meal toy is speaking only nonsense words and not something a little more adult.
Experts say the company may be right, and the curse words many hear may be tied to how our brains are primed to find words even when they鈥檙e not really there.
The world鈥檚 largest hamburger chain and purveyor of Happy Meals said last week that it doesn鈥檛 plan to take the talking Happy Meal toy out of distribution, even though some customers say it sounds like it鈥檚 cursing.
A toy bought by reporters made a sound that could be interpreted as the phrase often abbreviated as 鈥淲TF.鈥 Another phrase sounded like it could be 鈥淲ell I鈥檒l be damned.鈥 The sound quality of the toy makes it hard to say definitively who is right.
The little yellow Minion characters speak a nonsense language and McDonald鈥檚 Corp. said the Minion Caveman toy makes three sounds 鈥 鈥渉a ha ha,鈥 鈥減ara la bukay鈥 and 鈥渆h eh.鈥 The company issued a statement saying it received only a few comments from customers about the toy, which was introduced July 3.
Nonsense speech will sometimes sound a bit like a real language, and experts say human brains are also wired to look for meaning in noise and images. So people will sometimes hear words in gibberish 鈥 including words they might think are inappropriate.
鈥淭he brain tries to find a pattern match, even when just receiving noise, and it is good at pattern recognition,鈥 says Dr Steven Novella, a neurologist at the Yale School of Medicine.
鈥淥nce the brain feels it has found a best match, then that is what you hear. The clarity of the speech actually increases with multiple exposures, or if you are primed by being told what to listen for鈥 鈥 as most people who heard the toy online already had been.
The technical name for the phenomenon is 鈥減areidolia鈥, hearing sounds or seeing images that seem meaningful but are actually random. It leads people to see shapes in clouds, a man in the moon or the face of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich.
The audio form of pareidolia has been causing confusion for years and years. In the 1960s the FBI investigated The Kingsmen鈥檚 version of the song 鈥淟ouie Louie鈥 after concerned citizens complained that the lyrics were obscene. The band denied it, but hardly anybody could figure out the lyrics, including the FBI. The agency officially declared the words unintelligible.
Last year a group of researchers published a paper called 鈥淪eeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face Pareidolia.鈥
They wanted to understand what happens in the brains of people who see a face pop out of the toaster, and they received an Ig Nobel Prize, given to scientists who do unusual, imaginative or odd work of questionable importance.
The McDonald鈥檚 promotion is scheduled to run through the end of July.
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