Friday, March 10, 2006

Culture: communication by text and the power of the human mind

Mirjam Kesseler sent me this from Bosnia:

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny
iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The
rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is
bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a
wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! If you can
raed tihs forwrad it.

It's very easy to read! This 'phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid' may also explain why a lot of intercultural communication works very smoothly nevermind all the misunderstandings which should be occurring following theory ...

3 comments:

hoong said...

try some Dutch words that span 25 or 30 alphabets or more, then we shall see if it is as simple as the researchers at Cambridge claimed??? I am curious.

Human being always know how to find way to communicate if they want to. Smoke messages of the American Indians, singing in some part of China and elsewhere in Europe, bird-song as in the Tenerife, sign-language of the deaf etc. What is more intersting is, we manage to misunderstand one another even when we have proper communication tools such as this wonderful computer and internet!

hoong said...

Is the research based on languages that use the western alphabets? I am curious if that apply to other languages such as Chinese, Korean, Arabic?

Joitske said...

Hi Cindy, if you do the Dutch test, I will do the amharic one~!