Could you read the title of this post? If so you are one of the 55% of people whose mind has the power to make sense of words when only the first and last letters are in the right place.
Try this – it was sent to me in an email from a teacher friend,
Cna yuo raed tihs? I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. Aoccdring to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny ipromtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.
The middle of a word can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem! This happens because the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole. Amazing, and I always thought spelling was important!
Well, actually good spelling is important but this experiment shows that, in some cases, it might not be quite as important as we think it is. More importantly, this little exercise demonstrates the amazing power of your mind to make sense of things.
Two stories that demonstrate this from a classroom perspective – and that took me a while to work out at the time.
A young girl was struggling to read to me. The book had a picture of a girl walking in the rain. The picture was drawn simply and in blocks of colour. There was no shading or detail. I could not understand why the reader kept telling me the girl in the picture had an umbrella (she did not). It was only when I looked at the picture in the same way the reader was looking at it that I realized that her hair, drawn and coloured in the way it was, looked just like an umbrella over her face!
Another time, another story book, another struggling reader.
The last page of this early reader showed three people jumping into a swimming pool in which one girl was swimming.
The words read – ” They jumped into the pool together!”
The reader, with wonderful insight, read – “They jumped into the pool to get her!”
It would have been easy to tell him that he was reading the word wrong – but the way he read the letters made as much sense as any other reading.
The brains of the reader were using what their eyes were seeing to make sense of the words they were reading. I think these students belong in the 55% of people that have minds that can make sense of confusing information. In fact these students were considered as having an ability to learn that was well below average.
We don’t always get what we expect in this world – sometimes we get much, much more but often fail to recognize it.
