If Yuo’re Albe To Raed Tihs, You Might Have Typoglycemia
If Yuo’re Albe To Raed Tihs, You Might Have Typoglycemia
Ever heard of typoglycemia? Even if you haven’t, chances are you’ll recognize one of the viral puzzles that explains this phenomenon. Starting around 2003, an email circulated through what seems like every inbox claiming that scrambled English words are just as easy to read as the original words.
However, as cool as the original email was, it didn’t actually tell the whole truth. There’s more to scrambled words than meets the eye.
What is typoglycemia?
That viral email tested our ability to read scrambled words. Here’s what it looks like:
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.
Could you read it? Even with a mistake in this viral email (rscheearch cannot spell researcher), the truth is pretty much every fluent English-speaker can read and understand it.
The word-scrambling phenomenon has a punny name: typoglycemia, playing mischievously with typo and glycemia, the condition of having low blood sugar. Typoglycemia is the ability to read a paragraph like the one above despite the jumbled words.
Is typoglycemia real or a trick?
Does it take you nanoseconds to solve the Word Jumble in the newspaper? No? While your brain can breeze through some word-scrambles, it’s more complicated than that click-bait email suggests.
Matt Davis, a researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, will help us sort it out. Here’s what they believe the email got right: unless you have a rare brain disorder, people read words as whole units, not letter-by-letter. That’s one of the factors explaining why we can “magically” read the message.
But here’s where Davis reminds us why the daily Word Jumble still manages to scramble our brains for breakfast. That trending email led us to believe all we need is for “the first and last letters to be in the right place” and nothing else matters.Actually a lot else matters.
What makes a scrambled word easier to read?
Here are some other factors a jumbled passage needs in order for everyone to easily read it:
1. The words need to be relatively short.
2. Function words (be, the, a, and other words that provide grammatical structure) can’t be messed up, otherwise the reader struggles.
3. Switching (or transposing) the letters makes a big difference. Letters beside each other in a word can be switched without much difficulty for the reader to understand. When letters farther apart are switched, it’s harder. Take porbelm vs. pelborm (for “problem”).
4. We understand scrambled words better when their sounds are preserved: toatl vs. talot (for “total”).
5. Here’s a big one: the passage is readable because it’s predictable (especially because we’ve seen it so many times)!
Other factors play into it as well, like preserving double letters. For example, in the word according, the scrambled email keeps the cc intact (“aoccdrnig”). Double letters are contextual markers that give good hints. But we could also scramble it up this way: “ancdircog.” Breaking up the cc makes it harder, right?
All told, we’re code-making machines (we speak the code of English) and we’re wired to find meaning out of nonsense, in part by looking at contextual cues. However the codes can only be scrambled to a certain degree before we get lost.
Try these two (tougher) word puzzles
Try your hand at two hard-scrambled passages below which prove your brain needs more than just the first and last letters of a scrambled word to read it quickly.
With these, you’ll see why our brains can only handle typoglycemia to a point. The answers at the bottom; try not to cheat!
1. A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur.
2. In the Vcraiiton are, a levloy eamlred geren, pirlaalty frmoueltad form asirnec, was uesd in fcaibrs and ppaluor falrol hresesdeads.
The first example is from that blog post by Matt Davis. The second is our re-scrambling of a fascinating Jezebel lead. And they’re not easy! Research shows that typos definitely interfere with reading speed. (There’s a reason we have spell-checkers!) Tricky jumble puzzles that can take hours to complete also prove that, in the end, letter order and spelling absolutely make or break our comprehension of a word.
Ready for the answers?
1. A doctor has admitted the manslaughter of a teenage cancer patient who died after a hospital drug blunder.
2. In the Victorian era, a lovely emerald green, partially formulated from arsenic, was used in fabrics and popular floral headdresses.
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