Huh. Now that's interesting.

[ibneko]

Aoccdrnig to rsereach at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht 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 thought

Still, I think it requires context. I mean, given:
iprmoatnt
one doesn't think of important. I know I think of moats. and IP addresses.

But that'd be the first level of recognition... Hmmm. Assigning each word two values. One: length of the word. Two: sum of each character, as a number. Put all the words into a 3D matrix.. rows as lengths of the word, columns as the sum. Then from there, match.

So if we could teach our OCR (and voice recognition systems) grammar, we'd get better results. But that would require the systems to have knowledge of each word. That'd be the second level of recognition.

The third level would be common sense. That's going to be hard, considering how little of it's around. But just so it doesn't come up with "That tree humped." or something equally absurd. Of course, it depends on context... so...

Comments

[jaiwithani.livejournal.com]

Actually, I got important, but I think your brain was 'pretuned' to the prefix 'ip', which threw it off.

I think this trick works because the brain takes shortcuts when reading familiar language. Instead of reading letters one by one, it takes it all as a clump and picks out a few 'key' letters to id it. This is enhanced in an environment wrought with spelling errors, like the internte, wher e worsd are frequentlyy juts slightly scrwwed up.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Maybe.

But... sorchtuts? What do you make of that? And flimaair? Or luggaane?
Mmm, I think I'll keep going. This is fun~ itneasd? echnnaed? enemnorivnt? fletnuqery?

[jaiwithani.livejournal.com]

shortcuts. familiar. language.
instead. environment. frequently.

These take longer because the letter associatons the brain expects have been obliterated and patterns the brain is trained to recognize have been created.In the first, "ch", then "lim" and "air", then "lug" and letter repitition.

Each took about 5-10 seconds of staring, but the brain gets it.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

I boggle. Your brain must be better than mine. Or maybe it's because my first language was chinese? Hmmm. And yes, I intentionally added patters that the brain would target by default.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you missed echnnaed... enhanced. :D

[jaiwithani.livejournal.com]

Wow, I completely didn't see that.

My Brain: three words on first line, so three words in second row. Count: 1st, second-from-last, last.

Yayfor brain hacking.

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

See you're argument is flawed and your brain is deranged... ;) I believe it means you have spent too much time in front of a computer. IPaddresses = duh! but moats refers to your D&D experiences online, text based rpgs. I personally saw important in that sepllnig dsiatser :P I think its a urban myth that this comes from cambridge because I've seen it around many times before, but I never did research to check myself the origin of the study...

   _________
 /  Read     \
|between the  |
| the lines!  |
\____________/

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Hahaha. I am deranged, badly so. But, moat? I don't play D&D... in fact, I never have~ MUDs, yes, but those tend not to have too many moats. And they're always wellspelled. ...ya know, I think it's because I have a tendency to split words down to smaller words. Dunno why. Makes for better memorizing, mayhaps?

I see withe betewen your liens.

Mm, an urban myth... Meh, nah, it's not important enough to merit researching.

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

lmao I've never played MUDs so all All I know is anecdotal or was read in some readme, and I made shit up to explain the moat reference. :) no, but you do see the Read between the the the lines! right? :) the mind is fun.

[superdense.livejournal.com]

yeah, we read that during a halftime show, and then spelled "DCIK" on the field...they wouldn't let us do "FCUK."

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Hehehe~

'cause I'm having fun scrambling words... hmitflae?

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Not even if you'd had their sponsorship? ^_^

[crowbaress.livejournal.com]

The only thing that confused me was "Yaeh and I awlyas thought"

Of course, it sucks when you try to do this with numbers.

[superboner.livejournal.com]

i've read that study before. and i got "important" too. =P
but one of the ways that i read is by "word shapes"--the atcaul shape of the word. that's why when some people see it written out they can know it's mispelled, but not know how to fix it.

[contrasedative.livejournal.com]

I didn't have any problem with the initial paragraph. In fact, I remember that the first time I read it, I hadn't noticed that the first few words were intentionally scrambled. I was surprised when I read "mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are" because I didn't even realize that was what was going on. Of course, I already knew that I (and probably many other people) read words largely by the first letter and the general length of the word, with a few letters in-between. It's always been apparent to me, though, because almost every time I forget a name, I tell people "It's eight letters and begins with a B! And ends with a T! Argh . . . I can't remember any of the other letters."