Why does the the human brain ignore the second ‘the’?
In: 3
Our brains “autocorrect” all sorts of things. Blind spot for a visual example. We will infer from context when we can’t understand what someone is saying.
I think this is similar.
for efficiency the brain just assumes something that doesn’t make sense is something just misunderstood so it autocorrects it based on your memory of what sentences are usually like
I think you wrote this wrong, in the past I’ve usually seen it as:
“Why does the human brain ignore the the second ‘the?'” EDIT: to me, that structure makes it harder to spot, but that might just be a personal thing. So it probably doesn’t matter much to most.
But the answer in any case is that your brain is really good at finding faniliar patterns where it expects to find them. It usually takes a close eye to to find grammatical errors or spelling mistakes, unless they’re especally noticeable. You’ve seen sentences written since you were very young, once your brain sees the beginning of a sentence it most often has an expectation of _______.
Bet your brain filled in that blank with “how it will end,” despite the fact that I could have written nearly anything. And I’m wondering how many people are reading closely and found three mistakes in my last paragraph.
The human brain looks at words and phrases as a a whole in order to save time and processing power. Based on what it already knows, you expect to see one “the” for the rest of it to make sense, so you just ignore the second one and skip right to the important part, “human brain”.
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