This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. The researchers think some sort of top-down feedback mechanism (our consciences telling our sensory processors what to do, sort of) normalizes the visual input, allowing us to ignore the funny bits and read the passage with ease. This suggests that the letter-like appearance of the digits, as well as their context, has a stronger influence on our brains than their actual status as digits. In the case of the second passage (with the numbers in place of some letters), a 2007 study by cognitive scientists in Spain found that reading such passages barely activates the brain areas that correspond to digits. Thus, the letters 'serve as contexts for each other,' Kutas said. You onlythought you were reading the passage perfectly, because you automatically (and subconsciously) went back and filled in any gaps in your knowledge based on subsequent context - the words that came later.Īdditionally, in the case of the first example (the words with jumbled middle letters), it helps that your brain processes all the letters of a word at once, rather than one at a time. In the above passages, Kutas suspects that you probably didn't get every single word right just from knowing what came before it. 'We use context to help us perceive,' Kutas said.

Similarly, if we see a certain collection of letters or words, our brains jump to conclusions about what comes next. For example, brain scans reveal that if we hear a sound that leads us to strongly suspect another sound is on the way, the brain acts as if we're already hearing the second sound. We use context to pre-activate the areas of our brains that correspond to what we expect next, she explained. 'My guess is that context is very, very, very important,' Kutas told Life's Little Mysteries.

Type of card game jumbled words