The tappers are given a list of popular tunes, such as "Happy Birthday to you" and "Jingle Bells". They have to tap out the tune with their fingers on a table, and the listeners have to guess the song. Of the 150-200 times a tune is tapped, the listener ideally can guess the tune correctly only a few times on an average success rate of ~2-2.5%.
But here's the interesting bit. Before the tappers begin to tap the tune, they are asked to predict the probability of the listeners being able to guess the song correctly. The tappers usually predict a 50% chance that they would be able to get the listeners to guess the tune correctly. So while they think that they would be able to get the listeners to guess correctly one out of two times, the reality was that listeners could guess the tune only once in ~40-50 attempts.
Well, here's what was happening. As the tapper taps the tune, they can hear the song playing in their head. Their fingers seem to be tapping the tune in perfect sync with what's playing in the head. And they just can't understand why the listener is not able to pick up such a simple tune!!
And what about the listener? Well, they don't have the tune playing in their head, without which, they have no idea what's happening. They try as hard as one can to make sense of the bizarre Morse-code like tapping that they hear. Alas, to no avail. This results in utter frustration.
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