Welcome to Reading 101 I cdnualt blveiee taht I cluod aulcclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The Paomnnehal Pweor of The Hmuan Mnid Aoccdrnig to a rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rgiht pclae. The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the hmuan mnid deos not raed eevry lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wohle. Amzanig huh? No wdoner poorf rniaedg is scuh a pian.
this may rock a boat or two ... but... the ability to read the above post may not be so eay for student of years past that were taught to read EACH syllabol as oppossed to the word as a whole. it is still pretty amazing though!
then of course I remember earlier this year reading about the computer science graduate students that assembled a totally (gramatically correct and pointless pile of verbage) computer written research paper that got them awarded a prize, or an invitation to a prestigeous convention. It's usually coming around about the same time you see it go around.
What is more amazing is that some people will still call this "english", and not know the difference.
There's a Straight Dope article that seems to indicate that this is BS, but it is interesting. The article is interesting, too--it's about whether people can be dyslexic in Chinese. Straight Dope article that mentions this text
Since I had to type this out instead of copy paste I re-arranged the letters any way I could and The reading is still as easy. Part of the reason we can read this is we autmatically include sentence structure in our reading. We know that a verb is usually not found after another verb. This allows the brain to imediately eliminate some of the possible words from our list. Since the first and last letter have stay the same, the number of possibilities is very limited. Of course this only helps with the areas that the brain can't imediately recognize. Old Dan- I am not entirely sure what your trying to say, but I do know that I concentrate on the syllabols more that the word as a whole. This was identified as part of the reason I easily fall asleep when reading technical documents. The use of larger words results in a sing song pattern that apparently has the same effect as a lulaby. It's so bad that I can passout from being comprehensively wide awake to a snoring sleep within two sentences. I was diagnosed when I was in grade school and had it checked again during college since it made engineering school a little tricky.
That would make some courses in Engineering a bit more difficult, as if they weren't hard enough to begin with. I'm also sure you are right when you say this is how the average "brain" interprets what it sees. My point is that a great number of mostly "younger" people use this form of spelling all the time,(you see it right here on the forum) and think nothing of it. I'm sure the schools never taught it that way, so it comes down to lack of attention or just plain stupidity.
I remember taking a reading test where I read the whole thing flawlessly. Then the teacher asked me to read it again with out correcting all the grammar and spelling mistakes. The fact that I had rearranged sentences and read misspelled words without knowing it freaked me out.
Any editor will tell you that. It is even worse trying to find mistakes in something that you have written. I have an analogous observation. There are odor test kits for winemaking. These kits have dozens of little chemical reagent bottles in them. Each little bottle contains a chemical that is supposed to smell like a familiar substance. They have the normal stuff that you might expect: blackberry, cherry, lemon, and peach. Then they add coffee, tobacco, cloves, and more exotic stuff. They have chemicals that also smell like things you really don't want in a wine. Things such as wet horse, leather, mold, and rotten flesh. Here is the point. I have a lousy nose for winemaking. It is pathetic. In a group of six people there are often two individuals that can repeatedly detect subtle odors and aromas. I call them "bloodhound people". It is tough for me to distinguish apricot from peach. It's tougher to distinguish between elderberry, salmon berry, and blueberry. You get the idea. Here is the odd thing. When someone in a group correctly identifies a subtle aroma, others like me instantly recognize and confirm the odor. It's like the bozo that always says "yeah, I knew that" when in fact he did not. It is easy for me to recognize an aroma after someone tells my brain where to look for the data. It is uncanny. I suspect that there are lots of things we hear, feel, and see that have as much to do with memory as reality. The brain treats visual stimuli like that. The mammalian brain is remarkable.
I know exactly what you mean. I can't tell you how many times I've had a glass of juice or Kool-Aid, or had a red-berry flavor cookie or jelly, and my wife would ask me, "Is that raspberry or strawberry?" I'd look at it, taste it, look at it again, taste it again, and reply "I don't know. It's just red." I usually have to really concentrate to figure out whether it's strawberry, cherry, raspberry, or something more exotic.
