Only Great Minds Can Read

This Based on Cambridge

University Study?
By Mark Krynsky | General | 07 November 2008

Can you read the paragraph below?

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 dsenot 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 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!

End of jumbled text

You know you have themthose friends that love to send you
emails with anything they find interesting on the web. Well for the
most part, many of these are forgettable, but every now and then
something interesting slips through. I thought that was the case
with this particular one.

I became curious so I decided to research the origin of this.

Apparently its old and has been around for a while. It took me some
deep searching to find its apparently based on a Cambridge
University study.

According to a researcher at Cambridge University, it doesnt matter

in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is
that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a
total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because
the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as
a whole.
My next stop where I go to verify the truth of anything took me to
Snopes and they list it as status Undetermined regarding the
validity. Ive never seen that before and found that equally
interesting. In any case this is interesting and I thought it was worth
sharing.

Oh and in case you were wondering. I read this quite easily which is
what got me interested in researching it.

http://krynsky.com/only-great-minds-can-read-this-based-on-
cambridge-university-study/
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde

Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr

the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny

iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat

ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can

be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it

wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the

huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by

istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Or rather...

According to a researcher (sic) at Cambridge University, it doesn't

matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important
thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest
can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is
because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the
word as a whole.

This text circulated on the internet in September 2003. I first

became aware of it when a journalist contacted a my colleague Sian
Miller on 16th September, trying to track down the original source.
It's been passed on many times, and in the way of most internet
memes has mutated along the way. It struck me as interesting -
especially when I received a version that mentioned Cambridge
University! I work at Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in
Cambridge, UK, a Medical Research Council unit that includes a
large group investigating how the brain processes language. If
there's a new piece of research on reading that's been conducted in
Cambridge, I thought I should have heard of it before...

I've written this page, to try to explain the science behind this
meme. There are elements of truth in this, but also some things
which scientists studying the psychology of language
(psycholinguists) know to be incorrect. I'm going to break down the
meme, one line at a time to illustrate these points, pointing out
what I think is the relevant research on the role of letter order on
reading. Again, this is only my view of the current state of reading
research, as it relates to this meme. If you think I've missed
something important, let me know.

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/

If You CanIf You Can Raed

Tihs, You Msut Be Raelly
Smrat
Published March 31, 2009
FoxNews.com
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Chances are you've seen this in your inbox:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't

mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt
tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset
can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is
bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
the wrod as a wlohe."

Chances are you also understand it. It purports that the order of
the letters inside a given word doesn't matter, as long as the
first and last letters of each word are in the right place.
You can read the words because the human mind reads
words as a whole, and not letter-by-letter.

Well, that's what it says. But while it's entertaining and ego-boosting
(that is, if you can read it), it ain't exactly so.

The e-mail, while partially correct in its overall hypohsetis um,

hypothesis is "very irresponsible in several important ways," says
Denis Pelli, professor of psychology and neural science at New York
University.

First of all oops there was never a study done at Cambridge

University. And therein lies a tale.

The e-mail was originally sent around without mentioning

Cambridge; it got added after the Times of London interviewed a
Cambridge neuropsychologist for comment.

Matt Davis, a senior research scientist at Cambridge University's

Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, spent some time tracking down
the origin of this letter-transposition story.

He found that it comes from a letter written in 1999 by Graham

Rawlinson, a specialist in child development and educational
psychology, to New Scientist magazine in response to an article
written about the effects of reversing short chucks of speech.

In his letter, Rawlinson whom FoxNews.com could not track down

wrote that the article "reminds me of my Ph.D. at Nottingham
University, which showed that randomizing letters in the middle of
words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to
understand the text."

Rawlinson later contacted Davis, who has put up a Web site to

address the issues behind the often forwarded e-mail, to explain his
comment and thesis research.

"Clearly, the first and last letters are not the only thing that you use
when reading text," he wrote. "If this were the case, how would you
tell the difference between pairs of words like 'salt' and 'slat'."

Also to be noted, as one commenter on Davis's Web site, Clive

Tooth, posted, is that one permutation can result in many different
words, and, while you can take into consideration the sentence's
context, one still can't be sure about the author's true intention of
word choice.

For example, the transposed letters of 'ponits' could spell out any of
five different words 'pitons', 'points', 'pintos', 'potins', and 'pinots.'

The circulating e-mail itself is also misleading, Rawlinson said,

because it seems written to enhance the desired effect to further
prove its point.

Rawlinson points out that words with two or three letters don't
change at all, making them totally understandable.

In the e-mail, almost half (31 out of 69) the words are correctly
spelled. The words that are unchanged are also often "function
words," the, you, me, but, and which help keep the grammar of
the sentences basically unchanged.

The e-mail also transposes adjacent letters, which makes the words
easier to read. For example, "thing" is written as "tihng," not "tnihg";
"problem" is written as "porbelm," not "pbleorm."

Lastly, Rawlinson says, the phrasing used in the e-mail itself is quite
predictable. The sentences are simple and, given the unchanged
words, one can deduce their meaning easily.

Another expert in this particular field, Keith Rayner, professor of

psychology and director of the Rayner Eyetracking Lab at University
of California San Diego, said, "There is some truth to the e-mail in
that people can read sentences in which the letters are jumbled.
But, there is always a cost (i.e., they never read them as quickly and
efficiently as they read normal text)."

Rayner and his colleagues did an experiment in which they asked

college students at the University of Durham to read 80 sentences
with transposed letters. The letter transposition in the words
resulted in lower reading speeds for most participants.

The students read 255 words per minute when the sentences were
normal, and 227 words per minute when the letters were
transposed, a 12 percent decrease in overall reading speed.

"While it may seem that it is easy to read text with transposed

letters," Rayner wrote, "there is always a cost involved in reading
such text in comparison to normal text."
Davis, who seems sick of the e-mail, especially because of its added
use of the Cambridge name, said, "The moral of the story (at least
where Cmabrdige is concerned), is that untruths printed are very
hard to suppress."

But he does see a silver lining in the fact that a simple forwarded e-
mail has brought light to an issue near and dear to his research
interests.

"What's undoubtedly true is that scientific studies on jumbled letters

and letter-order in reading has increased considerably since the e-
mail started circulating," he said.

Now that you know the entire story, you'll be well armed with the
"real" facts when this "fact" comes up during cocktail hour.

Just make sure to answer intelligently.

And remmeber to aviod excesisve drniking.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/03/31/if-can-raed-tihs-msut-be-raelly-
smrat.html