ThinkBlog

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 ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl 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.

Amzanig huh?

Many of you will be familiar with this, psychology majors or not; it made its rounds September 2003 in peoples’ inboxes. This showed up a little while ago, once again, on the discussion boards for USC’s PSYC405 class (Cognition), and I typed up a little response that I thought was relevant. Part of that post follows.

First, the fun stuff:

• A Perl script by Jamie Zawinski that will actually scramble your text for you in this way can be found at the following URL: http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl

  (Discussing this with some comp.sci guys on IRC, all you have to do is leave the first and last letters intact and scramble the internals at random.)

• Aardvark Business (.net) hosts a web-based tool that will scramble your speech in a way that makes it much harder to read, for whatever reason. One head researcher decided to take a contradictory opinion to the one purportedly from the Cambridge guys, saying that if your words are long enough and the letter distribution is intentionally confounding, even if the criteria that the first and last letter be in place and the word be spelled (when decoded) correctly, then you won’t be able to figure it out without a great deal of effort. To prove his point, he got some CGI-savvy fellow researchers to design a tool that does just that. Check it out: http://www.aardvarkbusiness.net/tool/

Matt Davis, who I guess is actually a professor or at least a researcher at Cambridge, wrote up one of those really long, drawn-out, exhaustively comprehensive articles on this like all of those that intellectuals are prone to do when they see something that touches their field. It’s actually pretty fun to read, like getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s pretty long, though, so here are the high spots:

• He postulates that we can see this phenomenon in action in English, especially, because there is so much redundancy in the language (what with vowels & such) and we can get much of the general meaning of the sentence from context. In other languages—particularly semitic ones, e.g. Hebrew—it’s nearly impossible.
• Dr. Davis points to Graham Rawlinson’s doctoral thesis from 1976, “The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition”. In a note from Dr. Rawlinson to Dr. Davis, he summarized his points in a very readable, short-page ditty. Cool if you’re thinking about research in that area.

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 ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl 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.

Amzanig huh?

Many of you will be familiar with this, psychology majors or not; it made its rounds September 2003 in peoples’ inboxes. This showed up a little while ago, once again, on the discussion boards for USC’s PSYC405 class (Cognition), and I typed up a little response that I thought was relevant. Part of that post follows.

First, the fun stuff:

• A Perl script by Jamie Zawinski that will actually scramble your text for you in this way can be found at the following URL: http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl

  (Discussing this with some comp.sci guys on IRC, all you have to do is leave the first and last letters intact and scramble the internals at random.)

• Aardvark Business (.net) hosts a web-based tool that will scramble your speech in a way that makes it much harder to read, for whatever reason. One head researcher decided to take a contradictory opinion to the one purportedly from the Cambridge guys, saying that if your words are long enough and the letter distribution is intentionally confounding, even if the criteria that the first and last letter be in place and the word be spelled (when decoded) correctly, then you won’t be able to figure it out without a great deal of effort. To prove his point, he got some CGI-savvy fellow researchers to design a tool that does just that. Check it out: http://www.aardvarkbusiness.net/tool/

Matt Davis, who I guess is actually a professor or at least a researcher at Cambridge, wrote up one of those really long, drawn-out, exhaustively comprehensive articles on this like all of those that intellectuals are prone to do when they see something that touches their field. It’s actually pretty fun to read, like getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s pretty long, though, so here are the high spots:

• He postulates that we can see this phenomenon in action in English, especially, because there is so much redundancy in the language (what with vowels & such) and we can get much of the general meaning of the sentence from context. In other languages—particularly semitic ones, e.g. Hebrew—it’s nearly impossible.
• Dr. Davis points to Graham Rawlinson’s doctoral thesis from 1976, “The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition”. In a note from Dr. Rawlinson to Dr. Davis, he summarized his points in a very readable, short-page ditty. Cool if you’re thinking about research in that area.