B – ?tahw yaS

?tahw yaS

What if everyone wrote sdrawkcab?

The brain is a very talented organ. Not only does it allow us to see, hear, taste, feel, smell, move, etc. It has the ability to decode and problem solve. All of you that are reading this, obviously can read. So how do you handle the following 2 passages, that have been travelling around the internet for years:
For emaxlpe, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm.
S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.
Based on the limited research that I have done, neuro-linguistic researchers have been trying for years to explain why we are able to read those passages. They have a lot of ideas, but no definitive explanation.

Reading itself begins from birth as part of process of language. We learn sounds, and connect those sounds to words. The more connections we make to words the greater our vocabulary grows. When we are introduced to letters we begin to connect those sounds to letters and then to words. The more we learn to read, the more connections we make until those words become familiar and we see words, phrases and sentences without having to break everything down to its basic letter/sound piece. Think about it…when you see the word “cat” do you say “C” “A” “T” “cat”, or do you just see the word cat as the word “cat”?

I’ve been learning American Sign Language for years. The biggest problem that I have when someone fingerspells a word to me is that I still see the word they’re spelling as its individual letters. I haven’t made it to the whole word visualized memory, that I do when I’m reading the written word.

As your brain adapts to understanding words and writing, changes in those patterns seem to be easy for some to recognize yet still retain meaning as in my examples.

So, what if everyone started to write backwards? There are two different types of backwards? One way would be writing each word in reverse order, but keeping the letters and sequence of words in the same direction: enO yaw dluow eb gnitirw hcae drow ni esrever redro, tub gnipeek eht srettel dna ecneuqes fo sdrow ni eht emas noitcerid.

And the other way would be similar to mirror writing, where the entire piece of writing is a mirror image of itself.

Assuming that you know how to read to begin with, I believe that over time, your brain would figure out what it was decoding and be able to read what was written with the same success as you had with those earlier passages. Of course once your brain has successfully been able to read backwards, you are bound to have difficulties, at first, trying to read a passage that is written in the right direction. The learning curve would be faster each time.

Of course learning how to write backwards is the other skill that would take some time to learn. For the mirror writing that I did on this entry, I had the help of the computer and the internet.

And then what if…you had to read this whole blog entry backwards. You’ll have to try.

Click on this link to try: B Blog 2017 – Mirror Backwards