“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid.”

No, it´s not a mistake; you read that correctly. Or did you read that correctly? You should have read “I couldn’t believe that I could actually understand what I was reading: the phenomenal power of the human mind”. So why are the words jumbled up and how can you understand the sentence?

It´s a phenomenon called ‘typoglycemia’. Typoglycemia, a portmanteau of ‘typo’ (typographical error) and ‘hypoglycemia’ (although not actually related to the medical condition), is the term used for a supposed cognitive process used to read text. This piece of muddled text has spread via an Internet meme which claims that the brain´s interpretation process has been proven as part of a scientific study by Cambridge University. The jumbled sentence is the start of some text commonly seen on the Internet which is extremely easy to read and, although the university has denied carrying out the study, is an interesting subject nonetheless. As long as the first and last letters of each word remain where they are, and all of the letters in each word are still there, it doesn´t matter in which order those middle letters are written. This is because the human mind reads words as a whole rather than individual letters.

Similarly, numbers can be used to replace letters: 7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5! (This message serves to prove how our minds can do amazing things!). Mixed case words can also be understood although it has been proven to considerably slow down a person´s reading capabilities, ‘CaSe MiXiNg’.

Our brains have unique ways of processing and learning languages, and this goes for speaking them too. There is no hard and fast rule to learning a language and you should never underestimate your mind´s capabilities at handling the information it´s given. Laenrnig a lugnaage can be fun and rawreding!