eli5 : why is it so difficult for the the human to comprehend that there the word “the” was repeated?
In: Other
It’s the mechanics of reading and pattern recognition.
When starting to read you focus, matter by letter and sound out the word.
Then you upgrade to sight words. You no longer read the individual letters. You recognize the word itself, like you recognize a person’s face without having to examine every feature in detail.
And it’s weird, as you can quickly read words and sentences even if the letters are scrambled. You only need the first and last in place, while the rest are scrambled. Your brain is trained to handle this as misspellings are to be accounted for and corrected to but don’t change the meaning of the word.
For emalxpe you slouhd be albe to raed tihs wiouht to mcuh tbruole.
For adept readers this extends to chunking sentences. Entire phrases are sight read, without examining the individual words. Words that are structural, but don’t change the meaning of a phrase, and are common, are easily treated as background.
The brain is looking for differences in the phrase that change the meaning, and an extra of, or missing the doesn’t pass the threshold of importance.
It’s like recognizing your wife but not noticing her new hairstyle.
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