Typoglycemia and Predictive Coding

https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

This article was the basis of my presentation in class, but due to the 5 minute time limit I was only able to mention a fraction of the information. The page focuses on the original "copypasta" text:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

He breaks this down sentence by sentence, first doing a quick search to see if there's actually research being done at Cambridge University on the topic (there's not). He lists a multitude of studies that are relevant to the orders of the letters, the impact these jumbles have on reading speed, and more. The article makes a strong case that we read word by word, instead of letter by letter, but I still wanted to know why. After further research, I found that our brain's ability to read these jumbles is called "typoglycemia", a neologism of the words "typo" and "hypoglycemia", or low blood sugar. I'd like to note how amusing it is that we're essentially calling reading jumbled words "words with low blood sugar". In this article, they argue that our brain tries to "chunk" information, or package it in various sizes to process it, such as our tendency to try to comprehend the point of a whole paragraph at once when speed reading, rather than grasp each sentence individually. According to Dr. Margaret King, director of The Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis in Philadelphia, "The visual world is perceived by the senses and then simultaneously constructed by the brain to make sense—based on pattern recognition, prior knowledge and experience. This explains how we can look at a string of scrambled letters and still be able to see the dominant patterns in them, i.e. the first and final letters. Our brains are able to fill in the blanks (the de-arranged letters), an editing process that now makes the words fit our expectations and projections.” I find it interesting that this scientists seems to follow the predictive coding model of perception because of how intuitive it is. When we are reading, we don't necessarily have time to correct all of the "top-down" predictions we make, so we perceive the "top-down" before we have time to correct and realize the letters are jumbled, allowing us to read them normally. 

http://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-consume-information/