Raed tihs... yuor mnid rokcs!

Cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch 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 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 tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Tahnks, Rob Reid for frowradnig tihs one...  I'm ipmesrsed. Good lcuk wrtiing a comupter prorgam to do taht!

Comments

[William Jon Shipley]

I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but in fact it'd be easy, if you could solve the problem of computer reading in general (which is a big if). Which is to say, understanding the meaning of any given word in a sentence depends on the context of all the surrounding words already and our evaluation of the most likely meaning based on our culture: if I write "Mary had a little lamb" it's not clear whether she owned a lamb or ate a lamb or had some sort of sexual congress with a lamb.

Thus each word is more of a probability field (like an electron) than a point, in some virtual, n-dimensional meaning space, and the task is to write a program that can collapse all those fields.

But if I had a program that could figure that out, it wouldn't be any harder for me to understand jumbled or even misspelled words; computers would be very good at looking up all permutations of a word, they love brute-force algorithms. Really, for an n letter word, there are only ((n-1)! - 1) jumbles of that word ((n-1) because the first letter must be in the first spot, and -1 because one of the permutations is the correct spelling), which is a tiny number to a computer that can process billions of instructions per second.

And if I hit on two possible interpretations for a word (words that were anagrams of each other) that'd just be an increase in the volume of the probability field for that word.

[Chris Anderson]

You're right... The mind's genius is not in calculating anagrams, it's in instantly picking the word that the context demands.

eg. what word is 'rsein'?
The hgue red sun has rsein oevr the hrooizn
The hgue redwood has rsein udner its brak

[Chris Anderson]

So the mind isn't just reading whole words at one bite, it's whole sentences. At the very least, it's giving words 'provisional' meaning which are only confirmed by reference to the whole sentence. Where's Steve Pinker when you need him?

[Chris Anderson]

Just did some googling and looks like this 'meme' has been doing the rounds for a few years... It contains truth, but not the whole truth. Check this out...
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

[Mike]

I'm a linguistics major, and remember reading about this a bit ago (seperate from the meme, I've seen that one a while ago).

As that last link indicates, this doesn't always work (for example in Hebrew, to which I can attest, being a native speaker).

I only vaguely remember that article I mentioned at first, but the gist is that the secret to this is the vowels. You should be able to scramble the first and last letters as well, as long as you maintain some rules with the vowels (they can change places, too, but not as chaotically as the consonant are allowed).

I can't be bothered quite at the moment to look it up. But maybe tomorrow when it's not so late.

[Tom Lord]

Ok, as is my wont, lemme add something drearily meta and serious -- but this time hopefully Ted'ishly optimistic and fun.

A speculation:

Things are such that in areas of human value we can receive very corrupted signals and still get the gist of the message. This reading hack -- perfect fodder for the institutional structure of cognative psychology studies -- is an example: noisy signal -- essential comprehension.

I claim that this result has analogies (hard to formalize) in domains of commuication beyond simple spelling-comprehension.

Trivial example: The "People's Daily Online" has a subset of material that sometimes reads like transcripted rather than translated chinese -- really unnatural english but consistent in a way that must relfect chinese language. With a bit of exposure to this -- it becomes like a semi-second-language. It's easy to read. I think it's not even all taht hrad to wirght.

This works even better verbally which you can figure out if you live urbanly are willign to chat with people of lots of wildly divergent cultures.

-t

[metin]

ncie wrok gyus! i m ipmsresd

[sp]

This could just be another act of defamiliarization. By making the words "strange" we pay closer attention to what is written. It forces us to break down our automated perceptions. Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky wrote extensively on this topic.

[Peter]

Has no-one ever had to learn T-line, the journalist's favourite shorthand? It wrks a lt lke tht, xcpt it uss smbls basd on lttrs. Bt it's a sn f a btch t dcphr if u lve it too lng, r f u lve out too mny ssntl wrds.

[Mr. Snitch!]

The phenomenon you mention happens because the human mind works by assimilating patterns. We see the pattern of the word and its usage, and the context of the sentence. It's not true that we read the sentence in question with "no problem" - the fact is, the sentence is harder to read, because the interior of the words also form part of the pattern. Our minds have to work harder to override the small-pattern reader (our factchecker if you will - tells us if the piece is in English, looks for verbs and nouns in the right places, checks for obvious inaccuracies, and so on) in favor of the big-picture-pattern reader (which tells us how long the piece is - hence whether we want to read it, the general tenor of the piece, the overall idea - our speedreader if you will).

Once one understands how the mind looks for patterns and themes, one begins to better understand human behavior.

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