When I saw the sign saying “Fired Chicken” at the lusciously adorned buffet table, I didn’t think it was referring to a place for laid-off poultry to flock so they could exchange credentials and seek employment. Undoubtedly, that was because I read “fried” not “fired.”
As a matter of fact, only when I looked at the sign for a second time did I notice that “fried” had been misspelled.
That got me curious and I did some digging:
Come to find out, our brain can correct misspellings and lead us to believe that what we see is actually correct.
It also understands a message even if parts are missing or jumbled. For example, tihs txet hree is a toatl mses and yet one can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.
Self correction can come in pretty handy when deciphering scrambled letters. But sometimes a feature like that can botch up a sentence instead of clarifying it. Best example is my smartphone’s autocorrect program. Man, did I get in trouble for some of my text messages because I did not notice what was happening in the background until a milli-second after I hit SEND. Like when I wanted to write to my manager: “in your previous email” but the software changed it to: “in your precocious email” …
So, in summary, one could say that we humans have a peculiar capability to
– see something as right even though it is wrong;
– make total sense of a whole lotta mishmash;
– unintentionally create one big mess.
But then we knew that already, didn’t we? 😂
Brigitte Schneider
aka Ms. Snusihne
Copyright © 2021, Brigitte Schneider. If you wish to quote text from this article contact the author by leaving a comment.
So funny Brigitte! Thanks once again 🙂