Did you understand the words in this image? If so, were you curious about why? The original explanation, as written in the story, is that word letter is irrelevant. It goes on to say that researchers have proven  that only the first and last letters are the significant ones in a word. But that’s not the real reason.

By the way, this graphic’s source is an internet meme from 2003. Makes me think of the old, ironic adage  “I read it on the internet, it must be true.”

The truth is, there’s a more broad explanation to why this jumbled set of letters makes sense to many of us. It’s because we read in context. If we have a concept of the context of words, we can anticipate what they might say. And to a lesser extent, being fluent in reading means we can recognize  the shapes of words. Finally, our brains tend to group letters together like “ment” or  “ing”or “th”. So even if a word isn’t written that way, we have seen those letters written in those patterns so many times, our brain defaults to attaching the tried-and-true meanings so similar combinations of letters, even if they’re not exact.

I wasn’t really surprised that I could understand this graphic. In a way, this graphic is the text version of a person who speaks in a mumbling voice. we understand people who slur their words, pronounce things incorrectly, or project their voices over loudspeakers with a lot of static. Why shouldn’t we understand writing that’s also got a lot of static?

I must site old National Geographic booklet for creating this graphic and providing a lot of the facts in this article. If you’d like to check it out, it’s “Your Brain: A User’s Guide 110 Things You Never Knew,” Washington DC, National Geographic Special Publication, (2/12/2016) pp. 22-25.