Cna yuo raed tihs?

Ethan recently brought home a printout that his teacher gave him at school, which read thusly:

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too.

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 lny 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 neat demonstration of how well our brains work when reading, and how large of a role context really does play in our cognitive parsing. I tried looking up stuff on the net concerning this, and as far as I can tell the “research at Cambridge University” is misleading, or at least that research isn’t represented too well on the ‘ol ‘net (sounds like the “55 out of 100″ statistic is off too). I found a couple of interesting viewpoints though, including that from a professional speller and some guy who compares it to nucleotide polymorphism. But honestly, most references to this on the net are just people doinking around, and I guess with this posting the number of doinkers just went up by 1.

Hmmm, I wonder if it works with numbers too…let’s try it! What do you see here: 8.474132? Do you really read that as 8.314472, the universal gas constant from the Nernst equation?

-c