Eli5 – Why do we notice a misspelling AFTER sending a text and not before, even when we proofread it once or twice?
In: Technology
Typoglycemia (a portmanteau of “typo” and “hypoglycemia”) is a neologism for a purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes involved in reading text. The principle is that readers can comprehend text despite spelling errors and misplaced letters in the words.
I have noticed that while in the program I’m using (email, text, word, whatever) if I look at it too long, my brain anticipates what is expected but not what’s actually there. If I copy it into a different program, or change the font style or color, my brain thinks it’s something new and I can pick up the mistakes. Usually, the screen you type in looks different than the screen you view in, so once you’ve sent it and look again, your brain is seeing it “fresh”.
There are many reasons. One is that we focus on the meaning as a whole. So our brain see’s a word and even if it’s spelled wrong the meaning is still conveyed so it continues, it’s basically looking in the wrong place. This is why people train and study how to proofread, how to detach the meaning from the text and see the spelling errors separate from the meaning.
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