Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am wondering how does a human mind reads the whole word instead of each letters? explain the concept of typoglycemia

Honey12,

I think I would need a little more information to properly help you out. What kinds of research project are you looking to do? What question are you hoping to answer about "typogylcemia"

Here is some inforamtion that I found.. .

Typoglycemia is a neologism given to a purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text. The word does not refer to any actual medical condition related to hypoglycemia. The word appears to be a portmanteau of "typo", as in typographical error, and "hypoglycemia". It is an urban legend/Internet meme that appears to have an element of truth to it.
The legend, propagated by email and message boards, purportedly demonstrates that readers can understand the meaning of words in a sentence even when the interior letters of each word are scrambled. As long as all the necessary letters are present, and the first and last letters remain the same, readers appear to have little trouble reading the text. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia

Good Luck



"Unfortunately, as cool as the internet meme and urban legend is, it isn’t actually “true”. The brain does read words in chunks and recognizes word shapes, which allows people to “speed-read”. Matt Davis at the MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit in Cambridge, UK, wrote about the meme and points out several cases in which the rules of the meme are followed, but it is difficult for the brain to decode the word. Also interesting, Davis has the meme in several different languages." http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/mat ... Cmabrigde/



I did find an additional interesting site that allows you to type in your own text and it will scramble the words for you.

http://www.hartmen.us/todd/misc/typoglycemia.php

i would like to know an in-depth explanation on how the human brain reads word as a whole instead of reading letter by letter. thank you for helping. it is very much appreciated.

Honey12,

Typoglycemia is just an internet meme (An Internet meme (/ˈmiːm/ MEEM) is an idea, style or action which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet, as with imitating the concept.[1] Some notable examples include: posting a photo of people in public places lying down planking, or uploading a short video of people dancing to the Harlem Shake.). It is not truly how the brain reads words.

In the link I provided ( http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/mat ... Cmabrigde/ ) Matt David tries to explain the truth behind “typoglycemia”. He states that “There are elements of truth in this, but also some things which scientists studying the psychology of language (psycholinguists) know to be incorrect”.

Because of this, unfortunately it is difficult for me to answer your question. For an indepth explanation on how the human brians reads words I suggest either heading to the libray for a book on cognitive neuroscience or even starting with an internet search on understanding cognition / cognitive neuroscience.

Sorry that I can not be more help. Let me know if you have additional questions about your project.

i did get a book on how the brain reads.. thank you for helping.and please continue on helping people with their projects.

Great question honey! This actually gets at a key concept in modern neuroscience of decentralized processing. As it turns out, there isn't just one part of the brain which does all of the interpretation. Many components of the brain compute different aspects of the same information in parrellel. This is being studied heavily in the visual pathway. Even on the retina of your eye, your neurons are already processing the information they are recieving from the rods and cones to identify contrast and edges. This partially digested information is sent along your optic nerves, through your thalamus, and to your ocipital cortex. Here associations such as orientation and angles are processed. Then the information is sent forward. Our understand past this point is very limited as we have just begun to figure out how to study this. What we do know is that regions of the brain then specialize on increasingly narrow parts of visual input. There is a bump on your brain responsible for recognizing faces for example. Similarly the region responsible for language processes this visual information seperately from your conscious brain which we think resides in the prefrontal cortex. This is why we tend to to ignore trivial errors in spelling (like the second "to" in this sentence ). Hope this answers some of your question! I'm not sure it has fully been answered by anyone yet.

Thank you for taking time to help me understand the different concepts of my project and it is very much appreciated. The information that you've shared has help me understand my topic in depth. I have learned that visual information must flow in order to enter the language system. It analyzes incoming images for the presence of letters and forwards them to other brain areas that subsequently transform them into sound and meaning. Your information has given me another starting point to consider and understand.

No problem, stay curious!