Friday, May 18, 2007

Who Knew?

Every once in a while Em's brother Emails something that triggers the "I didn't know that!" response. Here's the once from this while: Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pretty kewl, huh? I vaguely remember something about how speed-readers get the gist of whole sentences by pretty much just scanning various words in them. I guess 55% of us engage in some form of meaningful interpretation of symbols. I wonder how often MY interpretation agrees with yours.

2 comments:

SpeedKin said...

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp has some links for further reading on the matter. I, being the ultimate queen of laziness tonight, can't find the motivation to click even one of those links.

I can read it, by the way, and I figure most people (with normal reading skills) can. I remember studying a speed-reading book when I was a kid, maybe 10 years old or so, and found it to be a fairly easy thing to learn. Just in case you were ever interested....

Don't ya love how I just ramble on about anything when I'm tired? Zzzzz....

Oldnovice said...

The bottom-line (as I read the Snopes stuff) was that this stuff made the tour of the net in 2003 and that there was no STUDY, but there was a paper (but probably not at Cambridge). It's more than the 1st & last letters being correct;and, yeah, MOST folks who can read can read this.

They also said that it looks like this was spread by Language Hat people. <--Those folks REALLY got into analyzing what letters could be mixed and how.