In scenes that will remind everyone of the white and gold (or black and blue?) dress furore back in 2015, people are currently losing their minds over a viral video that has left the internet split neatly in two.

The sound illusion clip features a computer-generated voice saying a word that some listeners perceive to be‘Laurel’ spoken in a deep male voice, while others hear‘Yanny’ in a more high-pitched tone.

'Let's get checking out a bunch of guys doing their best to apply to a set of fake lashes...'

The video first surfaced on Reddit earlier this week and has since racked up over 40,000 likes on Twitter and sparked off some seriously intense arguments online.

Professor David Alais from The University of Sydney has given an interview on the phenomenon to The Guardian, in which he claims that the illusion is an example of something called a“perceptually ambiguous stimulus.”

In a nutshell, he argues that the brain tends to fill in gaps when it can’t decide exactly what it’s hearing or seeing: “They can be seen in two ways, and often the mind flips back and forth between the two interpretations,” he said.

“If there is little ambiguity, the brain locks on to a single perceptual interpretation. Here, the Yanny/Laurel sound is meant to be ambiguous because each sound has a similar timing and energy content — so in principle it’s confusable.”

Others have predicted that the frequency, amplitude and the type of speakers used to play theclip may have an influence on which sound people are more likely to hear, adding that individual physiology and the age of the listener should also be taken into account.

Let us know which word you hear with a tweet over @MTVUK.