You’ve probably seen scrambled up word games like this before. This type of word scrambling is called typoglycemia, which is a neologism for the recent discovery about purported cognitive processes that are often involved in reading the written word or text. The principle is that some readers can comprehend text in spite of the words having spelling errors or misplaced letters in the words they are reading. As it turns out, this is one urban legend that is actually true. In 1999, Graham Rawlinson of the University of Nottingham discussed his 1976 Ph.D. thesis in a letter to New Scientist. In the letter, he discusses his work and references that.
This phenomenon could have also possibly been the result of the work of Thomas R. Jordan’s group, who studied the relative influences of the interior and exterior of words. Whichever work drew attention to this phenomenon, it’s fascinating to learn so much about the human brain through puzzles like this. Scientists believe that these sentences are readable by some people because our brains can use context to make predictions about what is happening or what is to come. Research has revealed, for example, that when we hear a sound that typically leads us to expect another sound, our brains react as they would if we’re actually already hearing the sound.
When your brain responds to the arrangement of words or letters, it is deciphering each word quickly and subconsciously. According to Dr. Lars Muckli, our brains are continuously anticipating what we will hear, see, or feel next. Human brains are the legit most fascinating thing in the world, aren’t they? The harder the sentences get, the harder they are for the average person to read. Also, if a sentence has a word that you don’t know, you won’t be able to translate it easily. It also depends on exactly which letters are jumbled up. So how did you do? Can you read this?
