Why We Need Others To Catch Our Typos

If yvo'ue raed something aoubt how the brian wrkos you may konw why you can raed tihs snetecne whiuott mcuh tbruloe.

I remember the first time I saw something like the mess you see above, and how amazed I was that I could read it so easily. What intrigued me more though was the concept that our brains can make the necessary assumptions to read words in bulk rather than through individual letter order. As long as all the letters are there and the first and last letters are in the right spot, our brains usually have no trouble piecing things together. This is because the brain is allowing itself to take shortcuts in order to complete the more complex goal in reading --> extracting meaning.

The brain actually does a lot of simplifying to help manage all that it does. Consider the fact that even when you are doing a brainless activity that requires no real thinking (e.g. fishing) your brain is busy processing everything you receive from your five senses, and simultaneously managing both passive and active motor functions in your body. When we add thinking to the mix, the brain looks for ways to simplify and generalize easy/component tasks in order to free up brain power. Taking the example above, the mind takes shortcuts on how we read individual words in order to focus on the harder task of pulling meaning out of a sentence or paragraph (aka "reading comprehension").

There is another shortcut our brains take when we read, and it actually inhibits our ability to proofread. When we read, our brains are pulling sensory information from our eyes (the words) and combining that with our prior knowledge to extract meaning and understanding. When we read our own work, we already know the meaning we want to convey, and we expect it to be there. This expectation makes it easy for us to miss things that would be obvious to others, because our brains are filling in the gaps for us. It's typically also this reason why we make typos in the first place. There have been many times where (in a draft) I've completely left out entire words or sentences about certain points, and not seen them during my review. In my head I read them, but I had not written them on the page.

Studies on "change blindness" show another way that our brains make compromises in order to focus. In this experiment at Harvard University, test subjects are asked by a man behind a desk to fill out a consent form for an experiment. When they complete the form, the man behind the desk ducks down to file it, and a completely different person stands up to tell them to go into the next room. About 75% of the people in the test don't notice this change, presumably because the brain is making assumptions for the things that it is not focusing on. Pretty amazing and yet pretty scary - it makes me wonder what kinds of changes I've missed this way in the past.

Even as we continue to push the envelope on human understanding and knowledge, it's important to remember that our minds are limited and that we will sometimes miss things and make obvious mistakes. Most of the time, though we would rather go it alone, there is no substitute for having someone else review and check our work.

References

Wired.com

io9.com