AT FIRST glance, the latest internet craze might seem like little more than astoblue nsnsenoe.

But an e-mail which suggests that the brain can make sense of written words even when the letters are jumbled has sparked the imagination of millions and could challenge current academic thinking about the way human beings process language.

The e-mail says that as long as the first and last letters of the word are in the right place, it will always be understood whatever order the rest are in. Or, as the e-mail puts it: “Aoccdrnig to rseearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae.

“The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.” Since this message was first circulated by an unknown source a week ago, hundreds of famous speeches and texts have been “translated” on the internet, including the Natnaiol Atnhem and Skhaespare.

Dr Rosaleen McCarthy, a neuro-psychology lecturer from King’s College, Cambridge, explained that human beings were able to understand jumbled up words because they primarily read for meaning rather than phonetically. “If you can anticipate what the next word in a sentence could be, you will not necessarily notice if some of the letters in that word are out of place.” However, she said that she was surprised at just how robust the brain’s recognition abilities had been proved to be.

“The human brain is a lot more tolerant than we had perhaps realised, and it has to cope with disrupting in everyday life,” she said. The theory behind the e-mail has been traced to a 1999 Nature article and a 1976 dissertation from the University of Nottingham written by Graham Rawlinson of Aldershot.

For those who cannot manage word scrambling, there is a website that will convert it for you: www.lerfjhax.com/funky.php.

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