Incredible, right?
But…. Is this claim completely accurate?
The complete truth is that this surprising neurolinguistic phenomena only works this way if the text meets a series of conditions, such as an abundance of short words, a coherent sequence among them and a “disorder” of letters easy to decipher.
Even though this appeared on the Nat Geo Channel (and later expanded onto the web) as a study that originated in Cambridge, the University itself denies such claim. Matt Davis, of the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, UK, tells us that in reality it probably originated in 1999 as a derivative of a thesis by Dr. Graham Rawlinson in 1976 at the University of Nottingham.
Dr. Davis also made clear that this phenomena does not work well in all languages nor with all types of words, and that it requires a lot more than the first and last letter to properly decipher it. What is really true is that our mind reads the words as a whole, relying heavily on the context to be able to make quick interpretations.
As a matter of fact, a brain that reads quickly is in reality almost “assuming” what it reads and only when something seems out of context; it goes back to review what it already read until it finds its proper meaning.