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Topic: a way the brain works......... (Read 14326 times) |
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bee-bee
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a way the brain works.........
« on: Sep 21st, 2003, 5:04pm » |
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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 total 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.
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Icarus
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #1 on: Sep 21st, 2003, 9:25pm » |
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Can any one figure out what this guy's saying? 
Okay - I admit I can read it. Though I wouldn't say "with no problem". It took me about two-three times as long as it would of spelled correctly. Assuming this post is serious (I can never tell about these things), I have two problems with this idea:
(1) Not everyone reads the same - those whose reading skills are poor may not be able to get this. I am also interested in how well those for whom English is a not yet mastered second language will be able to figure it out.
(2) There are pairs of words that are spelled with the same letters and with identical beginning and ending letters. According to this theory, people would have grave difficulty telling them apart.
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BNC
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #2 on: Sep 21st, 2003, 11:04pm » |
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English is my second language, and, as anyone who knows me will tell you, it is "borderline OK", but definatly not "perfect".
I read the statement in one "go", really without a problem, once I figured out it was intentional.
As for your points, Icarus:
1. Kids learning to read read each letter separately, and only then compose the word (my doughtr is at that stage now, so I know). Once you can actually read, I don't think having poor or better reading skills will change the resuilts much.
2. For properly spelled words, you will be able to make the distiction by aducation. I think that even for wrong spell, you will probably still get it by context.
I'm stuned! I wouldn't beleive if I hadn't tried it myself.
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towr
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #3 on: Sep 21st, 2003, 11:27pm » |
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Even though I can read it just fine, I don't really believe the hype, since it's been from numerous different universities besides Cambridge the last few weeks. The message has tell-tale signs of an urban legend, even if there is a grain of truth in it.
But try doing it in a sentence that doesn't make any sense at all, and you'll see it'll be much harder to decipher. Letter order does matter.
Reading skill also matters, since it takes skill to determine what a word is from context, with less cues than normal. The less sense the sequence of words makes, the more cues you'll need.
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| « Last Edit: Sep 21st, 2003, 11:38pm by towr » |
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wowbagger
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #4 on: Sep 22nd, 2003, 5:55am » |
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Recently, I received an email with an almost literal translation of the first post to German. Due to this head start, it wasn't really difficult to grasp - although it did take me longer to read. "Without problem" is questionable, of course, but the main problem may be Icarus's number (2).
Is this theory suggesting that we just scan through the letters quickly, guess what word it might be and come back if it doesn't fit the context? To my knowledge, reading doesn't work this way. If I remember correctly, studies showed that the movement of the eyes is discontinuous, so we (adults) read in chunks rather than letter by letter. However, I don't know of any evidence that we commonly change direction (within a single line).
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towr
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #5 on: Sep 22nd, 2003, 7:25am » |
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Reading and listening are the same in one important respect, we expect a certain continuation in the text. We predict what words can follow the ones we read/heard, and than further reduce the number of possibilities to one with the available clues: phonemes/letters, their order, etc
When a sentence doesn't seem to make sense on the most available interpretation we have reread a sentence.
For example, "the horse raced past the barn fell"
On the first reading it makes sense up to the last word, and most people will have to reread the sentence a few times to integrate the last word succesfully.
Due to the parallel pattern recognition in our brain people will recognize what letters are in a word sooner than what order they are in. So if it's enough to disambiguify a word/sentence the order clue wouldn't be important.
Of course the longer a word is, the more important the order. One important reason for this is that we can only distinguish 7 +-2 token at a time, so we can't see what all the letters are in a long word at one glance. This means we need two or three or more glances, which gives an inate temporal ordering, this makes it an important cue, which can be distracting if it doesn't make any sense due to lack of a (partial) ordering in the letters.
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James Fingas
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #6 on: Sep 22nd, 2003, 10:36am » |
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on Sep 22nd, 2003, 7:25am, towr wrote:
For example, "the horse raced past the barn fell"
On the first reading it makes sense up to the last word, and most people will have to reread the sentence a few times to integrate the last word succesfully. |
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I still don't understand your sentence!
But I had known long before this that most words are recognizeable by their outline more than by the actual component letters. This could be very simply explained as follows:
1) People learn to read faster and faster with practice.
2) People have a hard time distinguishing letters that are very close to other letters (the "crowding effect")
Logically, as you become more proficient, you will learn to read with an emphasis on the first and last letters (the easiest ones to see), and the general outline of the word (i.e. placement of 't', 'l', 'b', 'g', etc.). This provides a positive ID for the vast majority of words, when used in normal speaking context. Enough to get the gist, anyways.
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towr
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #7 on: Sep 22nd, 2003, 11:49am » |
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on Sep 22nd, 2003, 10:36am, James Fingas wrote:| I still don't understand your sentence! |
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Well, someone was racing on the horse, and went past the barn, and then the horse fell.
So, the horse raced past the barn fell.
Quote:| and the general outline of the word (i.e. placement of 't', 'l', 'b', 'g', etc.). |
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Surprisingly this doesn't seem to be the case. Experiments show that people don't use the outline, or 'stickpattern' as it's sometimes called. Even though it can vastly improve handwriting-recognition systems.
Which just goes to show people are weird and irrational 
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| « Last Edit: Sep 22nd, 2003, 11:50am by towr » |
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bee-bee
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #8 on: Sep 22nd, 2003, 1:31pm » |
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I guess it should say without too much problem then.....
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Icarus
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #9 on: Sep 22nd, 2003, 8:13pm » |
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on Sep 21st, 2003, 11:27pm, towr wrote:But try doing it in a sentence that doesn't make any sense at all, and you'll see it'll be much harder to decipher. Letter order does matter.
Reading skill also matters, since it takes skill to determine what a word is from context, with less cues than normal. The less sense the sequence of words makes, the more cues you'll need. |
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Now that sounds far more likely to me.
Of mbaye it hree csuore my bcuase I konw tset esay is me for pdcrueod me, orhets it. Wlil be for wlel. as Let esay.
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wowbagger
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #10 on: Sep 23rd, 2003, 3:31am » |
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on Sep 22nd, 2003, 11:49am, towr wrote:| Surprisingly this doesn't seem to be the case. Experiments show that people don't use the outline, or 'stickpattern' as it's sometimes called. |
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That's interesting. So do they/we switch from all-letters-at-once-mode to each-letter-sequentially-mode for whole sentences or paragraphs? Or can we easily switch back to rapid-reading after having read one word carefully?
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| « Last Edit: Sep 23rd, 2003, 3:36am by wowbagger » |
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towr
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #11 on: Sep 23rd, 2003, 6:42am » |
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on Sep 23rd, 2003, 3:31am, wowbagger wrote:
That's interesting. So do they/we switch from all-letters-at-once-mode to each-letter-sequentially-mode for whole sentences or paragraphs? Or can we easily switch back to rapid-reading after having read one word carefully? |
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I think people will switch back as soon as they can.
And even if a word is difficult to read, they'd probably read on the syllable level, rather than letter level (unless they either can't read well yet, or the words are handwritten and too hard to decipher otherwise)
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SWF
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #12 on: Sep 23rd, 2003, 10:30pm » |
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Maybe from reading too many poorly spelled posts and emails, I didn't even notice something was wrong with the words in that paragraph until about halfway through.
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maryl
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #13 on: Sep 27th, 2003, 10:17am » |
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What about speed readers? How do they do it?
I agree with James, we train our brains over time. I breezed through that paragraph with only one stop, it is pretty cool.
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Icarus
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #14 on: Sep 27th, 2003, 7:33pm » |
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And what about my little paragraph? Did everyone breeze through it as well? Every word in there is spelled according to the same rules bee-bee discribes, but I have also scrambled the order. Do you still recognize the words easily, or are they a bit harder, as towr's post suggests?
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BNC
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #15 on: Sep 28th, 2003, 2:27am » |
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For me, it was hdraer. I ausmse ctoxnet hleps qutie a lot. It is lost ocne you caghned the oderr of the wrods. 
::For me, it was harder. I assume context helps quite a lot. It is lost once you changed the order of the words.
::
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Kitty
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #16 on: Sep 28th, 2003, 4:46am » |
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I read it one go, it quite weird when you think about it.
Try this site
It a bit like that one.
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If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it.~Kant (1724-1804)
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maryl
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #17 on: Sep 28th, 2003, 9:30am » |
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on Sep 22nd, 2003, 8:13pm, Icarus wrote:
Now that sounds far more likely to me.
Of mbaye it hree csuore my bcuase I konw tset esay is me for pdcrueod me, orhets it. Wlil be for wlel. as Let esay. |
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Well yeah, I still don't know what the heck this says.
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| « Last Edit: Sep 29th, 2003, 6:28am by maryl » |
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Icarus
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #18 on: Sep 28th, 2003, 9:13pm » |
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The point is that if the claim were correct that letter order does not matter, then you would at least know all the words in the sentences, even if you couldn't put them back into the right order. But as towr says, letter order does matter. The reason you are still able to read bee-bee's post is because context gives additional cues. In my sentences, all context cues are gone. Now the words in the sentence are much harder to decipher.
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wowbagger
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #19 on: Sep 29th, 2003, 5:00am » |
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on Sep 28th, 2003, 9:13pm, Icarus wrote:| The reason you are still able to read bee-bee's post is because context gives additional cues. In my sentences, all context cues are gone. Now the words in the sentence are much harder to decipher. |
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That's true for me. What's more, you have to figure out the correct order of the words as well, so it's next to impossible to read and understand it all in one go.
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maryl
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #20 on: Oct 11th, 2003, 9:04am » |
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Here's something along the same lines:
One manager let employees know how valuable they are with the
following memo:
"You Arx A Kxy Pxrson"
"Xvxn though my typxwritxr is an old modxl, it works vxry wxll.
xxcxpt for onx kxy.
You would think that with all thx othxr kxys functioning
propxrly, onx kxy not working would hardly bx noticxd; but just
onx kxy out of whack sxxms to ruin thx wholx xffort.
You may say to yoursxlf, "Wxll I'm only onx pxrson. No onx will
noticx if I don't do my bxst." But it doxs makx a diffxrxncx
bxcausx to bx xffxctivx, an organization nxxds activx
participation by xvxry onx to thx bxst of his or hxr ability.
So thx nxxt timx you think you arx not important, rxmxmbxr my
old typxwritxr.
You arx a kxy pxrson."
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BNC
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #21 on: Oct 11th, 2003, 9:57am » |
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on Oct 11th, 2003, 9:04am, maryl wrote:
Everyone is a key person. But some are the "Q" key...
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wowbagger
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #22 on: Oct 14th, 2003, 8:11am » |
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on Oct 11th, 2003, 9:57am, BNC wrote:| Everyone is a key person. But some are the "Q" key... |
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Question: Qué? Is the "q" key used quite infrequently (true for German, but in English?) or did you select it because of it's conspiquous location on the keyboard? Just q-rious...
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Dostoevskys Mouse
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #23 on: Oct 15th, 2003, 7:44am » |
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on Oct 11th, 2003, 9:04am, maryl wrote:
Heh... This is just like a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, called X-ing a Paragrab. In the story, one news journal insults another for gratuitous use of the letter O, and the second journal responds by writing an article teeming with Os. However, when the manuscript is set up for printing, all the Os have been stolen. What results is this:
"Sx hx, Jxhn! Hxw nxw? Txld yxu sx, yxu knxw. Dxn't crxw, anxther time, befxre yxu're xut xf the wxxds! Dxes yxur mxther knxw yxur xut? Xh, nx, nx! - sx gx hxme at xnce, nxw, Jxhn, tx yxur xdixus xld wxxds xf Cxncxrd! [...etc., etc.]"
More on topic, I think people recognize words as much by context as by their letters. I read fairly quickly, and I know it sometimes happens that I mistake one word for another, similar word that seems more appropriate to the context, even if a couple of the letters are different. For instance, among Poe's writings (since I have the book on hand), I notice the words, "in regard to an influence whose supposititious force..." -- which suggests the more common word "superstitious," especially since the line is from The Fall of the House of Usher. I'm sure most anyone would agree that context is, if anything, more important than the order of the letters -- as demonstrated by Icarus' nearly inscrutable sentence above.
Just for the record, I must say I'm not at all sure about "The horse raced past the barn fell." It looks like it needs more punctuation, as in, "The horse raced past; the barn fell," or "The horse raced past the barn, fell." I suppose you might be using "raced past the barn" as an adjectival clause... as in "The horse, which had been raced past the barn, fell." It's more than a little grammatically dubious, though...
Don't mind me, I'm just observing.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 15th, 2003, 8:47pm by Dostoevskys Mouse » |
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towr
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Re: a way the brain works.........
« Reply #24 on: Oct 15th, 2003, 8:29am » |
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on Oct 15th, 2003, 7:44am, Dostoevskys Mouse wrote:| Just for the record, I must say I'm not at all sure about "The horse raced past the barn fell." It looks like it needs more punctuation, as in, "The horse raced past; the barn fell," or "The horse raced past the barn, fell." I suppose you might be using "raced past the barn" as an adjectival clause... as in "The horse, which had been raced past the barn, fell." It's more than a little grammatically dubious, though... |
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Heh, I hadn't noticed the ambiguity.. But it is a rather famous example in linguistic literature (or so I was told by my professors)..
The real problem is that most grammars allow it, while people would feel uneasy about using it. Just like most grammars allow infinitely long sentences, but most people use relatively short sentences because they are easier to understand (and even then, people often loose track in creating their sentences, and utter something ungrammaticle which is nevertheless understood perfectly).
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