Bored Witless And Browsing........................

[Ken4155]

..........................when i came across this;

Fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mind, too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny smoe plepoe cna! I cdnuolt blveiee taht i cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht i wa rdanieg. The phaonmneal pwoer of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseon't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset cna be a taotl mses and yuo can sittl 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 taht slpelnig was ipmorantt!

[waterboatman]

I've seen this one before. It just goes to show how complex the brain is. I too read it with no problem the first time. I don't know who came up with it, but they must be very intelligent.

[Hypognosis]

@boaty

I wonder if if emerged from someone's research project? The null hypothesis being that the brain *needs* the characters to appear in the correct sequence; the above disproves that.

I used to pity those whose languages are built out of pictograms, as they have to learn, perhaps, thousands of them. The OP hints that our brains treat clusters of characters as a picture/pictogram of sorts and words become one of the myriad of objects we recognise in our daily lives: 30,000+ words, thousands of household objects, thousands of plants and animal species.

We have billions of brain cells, with which to manage all this and each cell has about 10 connections to other cells, so it is thought that the patterns of connections are what achieves any given task. Having one cell do one task and one only is a waste of resources so having it participate in dozens of 'teams' makes it a multipurpose thing, in constant use.

Pucture a collection of 50 cities, each with 10 roads to its near neighbours; the number of permutations of picking, say 6 cities from 50, for a task is already quite large but the number of route permutations to complete a circuit of those 6 is enormous.

[waterboatman]

Very well put hypo. If it is a research project the writer is a potential professor.

[Togo]

Just a quick one ken. When you intend copying text from a page on a website to another(say Answerbank). I would advise that is easier, if you have both sites open, in separate tabs.

[Ken4155]

My apologies to you, Gromit, i thought you were being being a tad pedantic. I'll try to remember to re-post the item in a couple of years time - or i may wait until someone else does and.............:-)