Read this.

[Hammer Head]

Tihs snetnece povres taht the hmnuan biarn olny lokos at the fsirt and lsat ltretes of a wrod. The lrteets in the mdilde of the wrod are cpoletmley irogned.

Is this theory true.

[lafrancaise]

Looks like it, doesn't it? Why we had spelling tests I'll never know...

[shammydodger]

I don't think the middle letters are completely ignored. They have to be there in order for the brain to work out which word is meant.

[Mudman]

Not srue if taht is coeplmley ture. I culod not raed waht the qesitoun was.

[beryllium]

ok, now i'm a bit curious about something and totaly without offence.... Dyslexia? i wonder how the brain works in dyslexia...... or are the letters distorted out of shape?

[bernardo]

On.

[gammaray]

What a load of crap! The brain knows what you are saying because it uses learnt reference points and context to determine the meaning If you wrote the same words in isolation then you wouldn't understand what was being written.

[shammydodger]

Well said gmmaa!

[ezapf]

Tn I cd we a se ug oy te ft ad lt ls ad yu wd ud py.

[ugly_bob]

exactly ezapf!

Hammer Head - I saw this in the newspaper a while back, and it actually read a lot easier there. Whether this is because it was in print, or the letters are in a different order, or this isn't the first time i'd seen it, so noticed it more I don't know.

I think what actually happens is that we correct the spelling mistakes made. It took me a little while to work out the second word of the second sentence

[miss_me]

its a proven fact thats its true

[jno]

I susect it only works if the word has a unique spelling - if there are 2 words with the same first and last letters, you won't easily guess which one is being used. So they're not completely ignored, but may be of less importance. I had trouble with lrteets too - but I spotted at once that hmnuan was misspelt (extra n).

[jno]

on the other hand, I didn't spot that I'd misspelt suspect.

[caz21]

If it was a "proven fact" - considering there are only twenty six letters in the alphabet and millions of different word combinations to chose from we would be completely baffled as ezapf shows! We definitely dont Completely Ignore the letters in the middle, we just quickly re-register them using the first and last letters and the length and letters of the word as help, so infact we RELY on the letters in the middle!

[Azimov]

The fact we are all able to understand the original post would seem to support the theory but as to whether it has been proven remains to be seen!

The following link is very interesting, as is the rest of the site!

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

Enjoy.