Hey Brew!
Check this out!
Why does the brain skip the second the?
Well that doesn’t make much sense.
Read it again.
Why does the the brain skip the second the?
Huh, that’s neat.
Bew bew bew beeeew.
We got him!
Take ‘em away, boys.
We did it, Grill.
Oh, I’m so proud of us.
Honestly, that gets me thinking.
Why does our brain sometimes skip
over words when we’re reading?
No, is that the intro music?
No, Brew, don’t make this a vid-
Nobody asked for this.
Of course, this is not the only trick of this kind,
and it’s a prime example of a curious skill our
brains use to make information gathering easier.
I didn’t want this.
Let me try to make another one of these.
Grill and Chill are my best friends?
Oh Brew!
You missed it Chill, “my” shows up twice.
He’s doing it to us.
Alright, give me a shot.
Paris in the the spring?
Paris in the the spring.
Dammit.
Unfortunately, now that we’re looking
for it, it’s much easier to spot.
Let me try something else!
“Wehn deos the coclk srkite fuor, is it
bfoere or atefr I’ve eetan my dnienr”
When does the clock strike four, is it
before or after I’ve eaten my dinner?’
You got it Grill!
Did you folks figure these out?
Some of them are trickier than others.
The question still stands though, why does our
brain skip words, and how can it figure out what
a sentence says even when words are misspelled?
To understand how we skip words from time
to time, we need to know how to read.
Brew, I’m pretty sure they know how to read.
I mean, we need to know how reading
works on a neurological level.
How our eyes take in information, and the
processes our brains use to interpret it.
There are four basic eye movements that
researchers have identified so far.
Those are: saccades, smooth pursuit movements,
vergence movements, and vestibulo-ocular movements.
Saccades are short snappy movements of the
eye that quickly change the point of fixation.
The point of fixation is basically just a
conceptual point that your eye focuses on.
For example: if you were to read this letter by letter,
the point of fixation would be each letter, and a
saccade would be the movement of your eyes between them.
Smooth pursuit movements on the other hand are slow
tracking motions of the eyes designed to keep a moving
object in focus, like watching a ball move through the air.
Interestingly enough, it’s very difficult to make
smooth pursuit movements without something to focus on.
You can try it at home.
Stand on one side of a room, and try to scan
across the whole thing in one smooth motion.
More often than not, you’ll just fixate
on a series of points as you move along.
Vergence movements are motions to align each
eye with targets at different distances.
For example, imagine two lines shooting out of your eyes.
When you focus on a single point, those lines
converge, and a vergence movement is just a
change of the point where both those lines meet.
You can see these in action by setting out
a few objects at different distances from
you, and switching your focus between them.
Lastly, Vestibulo-ocular movements are how our eyes compensate
and continue to focus as we move our heads and bodies.
For example, look at my face, and move your head side to side.
Now, without even thinking about it, your
eyes moved in the opposite direction that your
head moved in order to keep looking at me.
Those are Vestibulo-ocular movements.
You’ve heard of peripheral vision right?
Yeah, it’s like the edges of your vision?
Absolutely right, but there are other sections of your vision.
From inside out, they go: foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral.
Foveal is the very center of your vision where
your eyes focus on the point of fixation.
Parafoveal is the space just outside the point of
fixation, and peripheral is the edges, like Grill said.
It’s pretty hard to read a book by looking a
foot to the left of it, so we generally use
our foveal and parafoveal vision for reading.
Okay, so we fixate on each word with our… foveal vision?
Correct.
But we don’t read letter by letter, so something
must be going on in the… parafoveal vision?
Correct again, Grill!
There’s a lot going on outside the point of fixation.
In a study by Herman Bouma, researchers found that their
subjects were able to use information gathered from
parafoveal vision to name words out loud, but they were
better at identifying real words than pronounceable nonwords.
Not only that, according to the article “Parafoveal
Processing in Reading”, readers only fixate on “about
70% of the words in the text, skipping the other 30%”.
What words are fixated on, and the duration of that
fixation according to this study, depends on how
commonly the word is used, how predictable the word
is, the length of the word, what age you were when
you learned it, and how many other words can be made
from that word if you switched out a single letter.
So you fixate on words that you’re not familiar
with for longer than ones you know really well?
Exactly!
We read in a series of saccades, or snap eye
movements, where we fixate on certain words.
Which words we choose to stop on are determined by how
familiar we are with them, in addition to how much information
we can collect about the words in between fixations.
Read this sentence again.
Why does the the brain skip the second the.
You would first fixate on the word “why”
because it’s the first word in the sentence.
You’d then continue to the right, fixating
on “does”, and “the” respectively.
Now that you have the words “Why does the” your
brain is already looking for information that
would make sense to come after those words.
It’s looking for a noun, so it skips over
the second “the” because the word after it
fit into what your brain is looking for.
Essentially the same methods your brain uses
to determine which words you need to fixate on,
also determines which words you don’t need to.
Oh, is that the same reason that when a word
is spelled wrong, you can still read it?
It’s not exactly the same, but similar.
If you’re really familiar with a language, you can tell
from memory that a word, even if the letters in the
middle are jumbled, means a certain thing if you can
figure out the context that the word is being used.
Like this.
But if I were to give you a series of complicated
words you might not be familiar with, and mix up their
letters, you might have a harder time reading it.
For example, can you read this?
If you can, tell me what you think it says in the comments!
The long and short of it is that our brains
are fascinating machines that do more work
behind the scenes than we’re aware of.
They’re like gorgeous little computers that
are constantly sopping up information and
sorting it into packages that we can understand.
Even a motion as rote and uninteresting as typing on a
keyboard, requires a supercomputer’s worth of calculation.
Odds are some of you have noticed our video’s title by now.
You might have even seen it before you even started watching.
So, congratulations, you managed to see the truth
despite all efforts by your brain to keep it from you.
Honestly, it just goes to show how important proofreading is.
It’s so easy for our minds to fill in the blanks,
and insert meaning into things that have none.
If we want to be understood, it’s our responsibility
to make sure we’re being clear, and maybe that means
looking out for the little things that trick our brains.
From cross-eyed stereograms, to the Ames room illusion, it’s
fun to see how such a complicated machine like our brains
can be tricked by just a few specifically placed lines.
It’s confusing, a little bit silly, and it’s beautiful.