bachelor's notepad.

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SEPT 24, 2003
'Teechr, why do we nee spling lsons?'
By Alfred Lee
STRAITS TIMES EUROPE BUREAU

LNDOON - It deosn't mttaer in waht odrer the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny ipmoertnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteres are in the rghit pclae, aoccdrnig to Birtsih rscheerechs.

The ltteres 'inside' the wrod can be jmulbed up, but you can siltl raed it wouthit a porbelm.

The reason: the amazing agility of the human brain to decipher jumbled letters inside a word.

As shown in the first two sentences, once the first and last letters are in place, the brain is able to speedily decode the mess based on words it is familiar with.

It appears the brain does not read every letter by itself, in order. It reads a word as a whole and then, faster than any computer, tells the reader what the word is, or should be.

This particular form of mental gymnastics is the latest craze to hit the Internet. Examples of what appears initially to be just gobbledygook are hitting websites, and are being sent in thousands of e-mail messages.

Nobody knows how it started although it is not a new discovery. A British psychology student wrote a PhD thesis on it 27 years ago.

Dr Graham Rawlinson, now aged 54, said: 'I am amazed that findings from my thesis have come up after all these years...

'My findings indicate that people have some kind of computer processor in their brains which can pick up letters in a word and sort them out in the proper order instantly, to conform with words they have seen before.'

Dr Rosaleen McCarthy, a neuro-psychology lecturer at Britain's Cambridge University, attributes this ability to the fusiform gyrus, which lies in the left part of the brain.

She said: 'Our brains are probably even better and more adept and more sophisticated than Dr Rawlinson has found.

'It may not be even absolutely critical that the first and last letters are in place and certainly, the brain can figure out words even if letters are missing.

'The brain wants to find the meaning of a sentence, not its phonetics.'

So, students may ask: 'Teechr, why do we nee spling lsons if you can make sesne of tehse wdros?'

Headmistress Enid Gillespie of Bevenden English College told The Straits Times: 'The need for classical English will never disappear.

'Would William Shakespeare ever have written, 'I cmoe to bruy Cesaar, not to parsie him?' '

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