Method of Reading Discovered 181
Scientists have discovered that the method our eyes use to process letters on a page is different than previously believed. Instead of assimilating one letter at a time our eyes actually lock on to two different letters simultaneously about half the time. "The team's results demonstrated that both eyes lock on to the same letter 53% of the time; for 39% of the time they see different letters with uncrossed eyes; and for 8% of the time the eyes are crossing to focus on different letters. A follow-up experiment with the eye-tracking equipment showed that we only see one clear image when reading because our brain fuses the different images from our eyes together."
flawed in the first place (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, this study was flawed in the first place. Our eyes don't look at individual letters, they look at groups at a time. I learned this in high school....
I thought we already knew this. (Score:2, Interesting)
I could have sworn we knew this was where dyslexic came from, that you see two letters that don't end up in the right order in your head.
Non-alphabetic systems? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:flawed in the first place (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet those extra letters are important.
Bt yu cn lv ot innr vwls and stll be mstly rdble.
Detailed but not News . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Combined with earlier news this year. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's always seemed pretty apparent to me that we don't reach letters in "correct order" by focusing only on a single one at a time. If that were the case things like speed-reading and scanning for content would be nearly impossible. Outside confirmation of this is nice however.
The real question is how much redundancy can we remove from printed words for faster information dispersal while still expressing things clearly. Sure, having everything spelled correctly and in long form is great for books for pleasure (art) but do we really need it for basic information sharing? Especially if doing so increases the time spent needlessly?
Hmm... that could explain the headaches (Score:3, Interesting)
Dyslexia (Score:3, Interesting)
Dan East
Re:Frsit Psot (Score:3, Interesting)
Yaeh, it's prttey amaizng taht as lnog as the begnning and the enidng of the wrod are coerrct taht you can raed it at alomst full speed.
Re:Fusing images (Score:3, Interesting)
It's very hard to put these sorts of brain actions into temporal order though. The brain may report that you thought of several related concepts in a particular order, but introspection often lies. Foe two examples that relate to this story, when you blink, the brain seems to distort your time sense so you are not aware of how long a blink really takes, and a blink 'feels' like there was zero time with the eyes fully closed, and if you look into a mirror, and shift your visual focus back and forth from one eye to the other, the brain edits out the movement, so normally, you are aware of looking into one eye, then the other, but you don't notice your gaze passing across the bridge of your nose in between. With deliberate practice, people can become aware of these 'self-editing' experiences, but most of us are routinely tricked by our own brains this way.
One of the big tricks some high level martial arts teaches (but usually not until you are pretty damned far along), is that the strike that just hit the opponent (Poww!!) right in the left kidney, was launched exactly as their eyelids reached closed position, and they missed seeing the first 200/1,000'ths of a second of the blow coming. If they had trained enough, their response would have been automatic, directed by a part of the brain not subject to this editing, and that wouldn't have worked.
Re:Frsit Psot (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently got a book on speed-reading.
One of those "as seen on TV" type.
I thought I'd give it a try, if only to see what I'm doing wrong.
Then I found out I could have written that book: it only teaches lousy readers stuff people who have had enough reading practice learned by themselves.
One of the first things in the book is testing your own reading speed. And the book says an average American should score about 200-250 words per minute, as calculated by the provided formula.
So I tested myself. And since the book's in English, I tested myself in English, which is not my native tongue.
I scored 453 wpm. On a completely unfamiliar English text.
Anyway, one of the first and easiest techniques described in the book was reading more than one letter at a time. Gee, thanks; I learned that when I was what, four?
So unless they conducted the study on first-graders, I'd say it's practically useless. Good readers focus on whole words, subliminally recognizing their shapes. That's why I can spot a spelling mistake in a text I'm not even reading - I just spot an odd, unfamiliar, "wrong" shape (at least in Croatian; English still takes a tiny little bit of conscious effort).
BTW, I'm so very disappointed in the survey for one more reason: I'd thought its results would help the development of OCR, but I guess that was too much to expect.
Re:Non-alphabetic systems? (Score:2, Interesting)
Korean (Hangul) is an alphabetic system. The study might be really interesting there because Korean letters are always aggregated in blocks of two or three letters. It's part of the way they write. I have no idea if Koreans read these blocks as one.
It's also a cool system because it was designed from scratch and follows a number of logical rules that makes it comparatively easy to learn (the alphabet... not the language). You can learn reading basic Hangul while on the plane to Korea.
The wikipedia article is quite good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul [wikipedia.org]
Re:Frsit Psot (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe my memory is bad, but didn't scientists use to think we read the whole word at the same time, unless it was unusallly long and unfamiliar? In which case, we read it a syllable at a time. Reading skill was measured more or less in how many syllables one could ingest at the same time.