Try Reading This!!!

senseiman

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I thought this was pretty interesting, says a lot about the human mind. Give it a try:

"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 Uinervtsy, 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 rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh, and I awlyas thuhogt slpeling was ipmorantt."
 
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Quite alarming!

I could read it at almost normal speed! The premise stated is obviously not far off the mark!

Of course - I suppose you would probably have to be a native speaker ... but ...

... and I also have a friend who is dyslexic - all of her letters read just like that! (Sorry, Jane!)

Remarkable - and most interesting.

?W????
 
Very interesting! Midway while realizing what was going on I tried reading it at a slightly faster-than-normal speed on my first try and found out I could understand it perfectly!

Upon second thought, I still don't really enjoy reading those really poor sentences you see on the net every so often. Does it always have to be first and last letter, consistently? Also, I guess the grammatical structure would play a part in the ease of reading, too, and I have the sense that you rarely see poor spelling of that level without poor grammar.

Hm..... But it's still pretty interesting the way we pick out words. I remember reading this fantasy book in which one of the characters could read whole sentences at a time, but I guess you'd have to be familiar with every sentence which could possibly be written!
 
I could read it just like a normal text. It would be interesting to test that with kanji or kana. It probably wouldn't work with kanas. Kanji could be a bit deformed, with added or missing strokes (can't test it on a PC though). That's why I had little problem reading Chinese simplified kanji when I went to China. The brain can easily guess what kanji it is from the context, like in the above example in English.
 
Further proof for that hypothesis is that when reading we sometimes mistake words for other words that start and end with the same letter and share some letters in the middle. It's only when the context clues us in that it doesn't make any sense that we go back and realize what we've done. At least I hope that's true for everybody, because I know I do it all the time. :blush::relief:
 
Redundancy lets us read worse text

Hahahaha... I luvdit Senseiman. Grate staff !!

Good point aoubt reeding spiid; I tried reading it at normal spiid, and it made perfect sense. I havn't tried going faster, though.

As for the rules of the following are strictly adhered to, I would say lastmagi's criticism on perfect grammar also has a point.

1) first and last letters are correct.
2) the rest are only scrambled, not randomly replaced by other letters as in a real typing situation.
3) Grammar, vocab, and style are pretty much normal English; which might not be so in many hurried, unchecked posts.

Neertheless, the result is quite amazing in that fast reading is possible on scrambled text ! I wonder if the military has ever used this type of light scrampling for quick, routine transmissions.
 
I also could read it like a normal text.The human mind is great don't you think ? As Maciamo pointed out, with Japanese it might be different...I would like to test it though. :)
 
I would most definitely have to agree with this. The text looks very similar to how I type :relief: When I chat with someone, I always mistype. Always :blush: I type quite fast but have never really bothered to learn a proper typing system... It'd be interesting to see how I mistype words, to me it seems like the same words are usually mistyped the same way. I've gotten some complaints about cyphering what I say by mistyping it but I've usually just said that it's only for their own good: it only practises your brain ;P (of course it has nothing to do with me being too lazy to proofread before I send something)

I don't always even notice mistyped words if I'm not watching out for them - espescially if the typo is similar to the ones I make. I think I'm more likely to notice words that are spelled wrong instead of mistyped (than: then vs. tahn) but then again, I think it has something to do with either misspelling a word so that it means something else than what you intended or that it has elements/letters that I don't expect to see (compared to mistyped words
that have the letters you expect to see, only in different order).
 
When you think of it you do the same with text speech. Letters can be missing, but you can still read what is being sent. There is a book by Iain M.Banks called Feersum Endjinn. There are chapters in that book that are written phonetically, almost as if the narrative had been written by someone with dyslexia. You can still make out the context evn though the wors are spelt wrong. What I would like to know is if someone who suffers from dyslexia was taught how to read and write Japanese, would the condition still cause problems, especially with Kanji? After all these are based on stylised pictures.
 
i saw something like this before yeah, can read it at the same speed yeah.. maybe faster wuhahahahahahahahah * damn, i am hyper again, study study,, sorry i am not on jref that many times , busy busy busy busy..OFF TOPIC !!!!
 
One interesting note is that I didn't find this in a linguistics text, it was actually in a legal textbook.

The main issue is that the human mind tends to "fill in the blanks" automatically when it sees something it thinks should be there but may actually not be. In legal cases this poses a problem when it comes to eyewitnesses to crimes who may subconsciously fill in gaps in their recollection of events to suit what they think ought to be there. For example, a person might pick a suspect out of a lineup whose face they in reality never saw while witnessing the crime but whose face they did see in a newspaper photo after the event. Without any dishonesty on the part of the witness, their mind may automatically infer that they saw this person commit the crime, when in fact they may not have. It happens more often than you'd think.

There is another quick experiment you can perform on yourself that will show how the mind 'fills in the blanks" like that. The human eye has a blind spot, where the optic nerve connects with the eyeball, where it can't see anything. In other words, if the view of things you see from your eye is represented as a circle, there is a small spot in the middle of that which you actually can't see. But people have no idea that this exists. Partially this is because when you have both eyes open one eye can see what the other can't. But even if you have one eye shut you don't notice it because your mind automatically "fills in" the missing piece. If you are outside on a dark night and you see a light in the distance, try closing one eye and staring directly at it. Slowly shift the angle of your eye -keeping the light near the centre of your vision - and you will suddenly find that the light vanishes! It has in fact entered your eye's blind spot and your mind has simply filled in the spot with an image of the dark background.

Neat stuff.
 
that was pretty amazing. I read it at full speed, but I can read upside down at full speed too. Because that is my mutant power.
 
Yes, I've seen the text before. It's really cool.

The theory you mentioned about the human tends to "fill in the blank" sounds very convincing.
 
actually... this doesn't surprise me at all. I learned Italian at a very young age 5-6 and because i could speak it fluently and understand it very well... when i got older and managed to start reading books in italian... although it was my first time reading an actual book the words came by itself just like the text. As soon as i would see the first 2 or 3 letters and depending on the context i would fill in the word... pretty crazy stuff..well not really but still :p
 
Other than the word "rwod," which does not follow the pattern, I could read it flawlessly! So, English words are like kanji after all...
 
Gaijinian said:
Other than the word "rwod," which does not follow the pattern, I could read it flawlessly! So, English words are like kanji after all...

Oops...that was a typo but its fixed now!
 
Didn't have a problem reading it at normal speed. Amazing how the mind automatically fixes it so you can understand it. I don't have a problem reading or writing upside down either.
 
I cna't see the same applying to Japanese. The key element in that reading is "first and last letters of the word in the right place." InJapanesethereisnoidentifiablefirstorlastletterofawordsoamisplacedletterwouldthorweveerythingintochoas
 
We do the same thing when listening, as well. As someone starts a sentence we start to fill in possibilities for the final outcome, so that we don't necessarily focus on every word that is being said. I've really noticed that in listening to Japanese speech, because since it isn't my native language I can't guess as well as to what the following will be, although for familiar vocabulary and grammar I usually don't have a problem. But that's part of listening comprehension, being able to guess what comes next. Well, it's also part of reading comprehension, come to think of it.

I can see somewhat of a correlation with what I wrote above in Japanese. Lots of times I think that when I see ���܂� I'm actually seeing the first part of ����܂���; that slows down the reading a bit. This makes me think that switching kana around, as long as the first and last are the same, would have the same effect. With kanji there's the whole process of recognizing compounds and not paying particular attention to the radicals or all of the strokes, which I cite as a reason for many people not being able to write what they can recognize.

As for dyslexics and Japanese, this thread should be of interest (originally asked about Chinese, but it holds true for any language that uses logographs, apparently).
 
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