It’s like Autocorrect, but for your brain
If you’ve ever used a word processor like Microsoft Word before, you’ve probably encountered the wonderful Autocorrect function. Autocorrect fixes some commonly made spelling errors as you type, which helps improve typing speed by reducing the need to manually correct those mistakes.
Interestingly enough, the human brain also has a built-in mechanism that catches these types of errors and mentally fixes them while they’re being read. Let’s take a look at this paragraph:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Weird, isn’t it? However, there are a few flaws in this argument.
According to the way the letters are supposed to be shuffled (the first and last letter of each word stays in the same position), words with three or fewer letters are unchanged. There are 32 words that are unaffected by the shuffling — that’s almost half the paragraph! Likewise, the shuffled four-letter words are easy to read because they can only be rearranged by swapping the middle two letters. For the remaining words, the rearrangements of the letters are fairly intuitive. For example, “porbelm” is only two letter switches away from “problem.”
Although it is true that we consider the entire word instead of just the individual letters when we read, the examples presented in the paragraph above are much too simple. Consider words like “Cgibramde” as opposed to “Cmabrigde” that was in the paragraph; a well-shuffled word is much harder to recognize.
What does this have to do with communicating science? Being able to be clearly understood is an important skill to have when it comes to sharing knowledge and information with others. While there is some truth with the “letter order doesn’t matter” argument (in the fact that the brain processes entire words at a time instead of letter-by-letter), a lot of it is just misleading science.
September 18th, 2011 at 6:31 pm
This is very interesting! This auto-correct in our head sometimes prevents us from efficient editing. Especially in younger people. Sometimes kids tend to skip or forget letters in words, because of this auto-correct. It is also more difficult for them to correct their own mistakes when they reread what they have written because they read the word, not the letters.
September 20th, 2011 at 8:54 am
This post and video have debunked this myth for me! Thanks.
September 22nd, 2011 at 9:05 pm
Huh! I wish I had seen this video earlier. I was at a seminar here at UBC over the summer where the presenters used this paragraph to make a point.
September 30th, 2011 at 12:37 am
Wow, I had never thought of whether it would have been more difficult to decipher words if they were well shuffled. This is indeed misleading. However, I presume that most of the typographical errors one makes would be similar to the ones in the example, which is perhaps why my brain is guilty of auto-correcting too.