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Maybe even more interesting: "At first, B.T.’s renewed sight was restricted to recognizing whole words in that one identity. If asked, she couldn’t even see th
by azernik 11y ago
Maybe even more interesting:
"At first, B.T.’s renewed sight was restricted to recognizing whole words in that one identity. If asked, she couldn’t even see the individual letters that made up the words, just the words themselves. But it gradually expanded, first to higher-order visual processes (like reading), then to lower-level ones (like recognizing patterns) until most of her personalities were able to see most of the time."
- ccozan 11y agoI can't find a quick reference now, but is long known that when we read - at least the educated and well-read adults -, we don't actually go for each individual letter, but we read word shapes and recognize them faster. Fast readers can even compress this recognition for two, three or more words at a time, reading in like flashes. It takes some training and there are somebooks that exploit this to make you a fast reader.
- DanBC 11y agoWe know that trying to teach children to read using this method is pretty terrible.
- PeCaN 11y agoIt's almost like training a recurrent neural network, you get the best results if you teach them letter-by-letter and let them work out the structure themselves.
- ccozan 11y agoBut I never implied that this is for children. Once we reach a certain age, and we are/were avid readers we "skip" reading the letters. Children cannot yet do this, of course, it takes training.
- azernik 11y agoOne great experimental demonstration is these chain letters going around with all the letters in each word but the first and the last scrambled up - you can still read it at a good fraction of normal speed. What's interesting to me is that this high-level processing can make it into conscious awareness before the lower-level features involved (not letters, but at least shapes and colors - which came after reading in this case).