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What is the scientific reason for this?

When reading, you don't actually read every letter of every word. You glance at each word long enough for your brain to fill in the meaning. So when looking for F's, the you are much more likely to register the letter if it's near the beginning of a long word. You recognize "of" almost immediately, and your brain doesn't even register the second letter.

Similar effect as this:
brain_cool1a.gif
 
beero1000 said:
When reading, you don't actually read every letter of every word. You glance at each word long enough for your brain to fill in the meaning. So when looking for F's, the you are much more likely to register the letter if it's near the beginning of a long word. You recognize "of" almost immediately, and your brain doesn't even register the second letter.

Similar effect as this:
View attachment 335
Click to expand...

I went letter for letter. I did not even know what the thing said. There seems to be something more to it.

If you don't believe me, ask someone who has not this yet to look at each letter independently. That person will probably still leave out the last 3 F's.
 
ryan said:
beero1000 said:
When reading, you don't actually read every letter of every word. You glance at each word long enough for your brain to fill in the meaning. So when looking for F's, the you are much more likely to register the letter if it's near the beginning of a long word. You recognize "of" almost immediately, and your brain doesn't even register the second letter.

Similar effect as this:
View attachment 335
Click to expand...

I went letter for letter. I did not even know what the thing said. There seems to be something more to it.

If you don't believe me, ask someone who has not this yet to look at each letter independently. That person will probably still leave out the last 3 F's.
Click to expand...

You only think you did. Your brain is really good at skipping steps and tricking you into thinking that you didn't.

I found all 6 F's.
 
beero1000 said:
ryan said:
beero1000 said:
When reading, you don't actually read every letter of every word. You glance at each word long enough for your brain to fill in the meaning. So when looking for F's, the you are much more likely to register the letter if it's near the beginning of a long word. You recognize "of" almost immediately, and your brain doesn't even register the second letter.

Similar effect as this:
View attachment 335
Click to expand...

I went letter for letter. I did not even know what the thing said. There seems to be something more to it.

If you don't believe me, ask someone who has not this yet to look at each letter independently. That person will probably still leave out the last 3 F's.
Click to expand...

You only think you did. Your brain is really good at skipping steps and tricking you into thinking that you didn't.

I found all 6 F's.
Click to expand...

What method did you use?
 
Because you're consciously focussing on a hard f sound to count the number of f's, which makes you pass over the soft f's. Something like that.
 
Yes, many people do miss it over and over... this is a great example of how our brain needs to take shortcuts to make any sense of the world and how our peception of the world based on our senses is only a good starting point, but not a good end-all-explanation.

We look at patterns and draw conclusions very quickly (the "of" doesn't count / matter, ignore it, taking too much time.. move on before you get eaten by a tiger).

Or a far more common example... "Believing in coincidences can get you eaten by a tiger, if you don't suspect the wind in the branches might be an intelligent agent at work against you.".. Therefore everything is designed, a possible threat, and follows a predictable pattern.

God belief is like missing the F over and over again. Perhaps there is a corelation to god belief and not being able to stop taking shortcuts.
 
Malintent said:
Yes, many people do miss it over and over... this is a great example of how our brain needs to take shortcuts to make any sense of the world and how our peception of the world based on our senses is only a good starting point, but not a good end-all-explanation.

We look at patterns and draw conclusions very quickly (the "of" doesn't count / matter, ignore it, taking too much time.. move on before you get eaten by a tiger).

Or a far more common example... "Believing in coincidences can get you eaten by a tiger, if you don't suspect the wind in the branches might be an intelligent agent at work against you.".. Therefore everything is designed, a possible threat, and follows a predictable pattern.

God belief is like missing the F over and over again. Perhaps there is a corelation to god belief and not being able to stop taking shortcuts.
Click to expand...
Without those shortcuts people would likely not be able to function at all. The brain just doesn't have the capacity to take in and analyze everything that the senses provide. It picks up what has proven to be important and pretty much ignores everyting else. This is why eye witness accounts of some event are so unreliable and why the account of an event from different eye witnesses will disagree on many of the details. Most of those details are "fillers" (added by the brain from other experiences) when the event is recalled in order to make sense of what the brain did take in from the senses of the event.

ETA:
I just thought of a good example that demonstrates how little of what we see is actually taken in and processed by the brain. Check this short video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

spoiler hidden:

Anyone taking that little test would see the gorilla but the brain ignored it because it wasn't important for the task at hand. So the gorilla didn't exist as far as the brain was concerned.

 
Last edited:
skepticalbip said:
Malintent said:
Yes, many people do miss it over and over... this is a great example of how our brain needs to take shortcuts to make any sense of the world and how our peception of the world based on our senses is only a good starting point, but not a good end-all-explanation.

We look at patterns and draw conclusions very quickly (the "of" doesn't count / matter, ignore it, taking too much time.. move on before you get eaten by a tiger).

Or a far more common example... "Believing in coincidences can get you eaten by a tiger, if you don't suspect the wind in the branches might be an intelligent agent at work against you.".. Therefore everything is designed, a possible threat, and follows a predictable pattern.

God belief is like missing the F over and over again. Perhaps there is a corelation to god belief and not being able to stop taking shortcuts.
Click to expand...
Without those shortcuts people would likely not be able to function at all. The brain just doesn't have the capacity to take in and analyze everything that the senses provide. It picks up what has proven to be important and pretty much ignores everyting else. This is why eye witness accounts of some event are so unreliable and why the account of an event from different eye witnesses will disagree on many of the details. Most of those details are "fillers" (added by the brain from other experiences) when the event is recalled in order to make sense of what the brain did take in from the senses of the event.

ETA:
I just thought of a good example that demonstrates how little of what we see is actually taken in and processed by the brain. Check this short video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

spoiler hidden:

Anyone taking that little test would see the gorilla but the brain ignored it because it wasn't important for the task at hand. So the gorilla didn't exist as far as the brain was concerned.

Click to expand...

It doesn't work with kids. When I showed this to my son (two and a half at the time), he shouted out

"ape's also playing ball"

at the appropriate moment.
 
In addition to not stopping on each letter, our eyes do not even scan an a linear left to right pattern when we encounter words. Our eyes often do something like 2 steps forward and 1 step back, and whether they go back at all will depend upon whether the brain already recognizes the word based upon the parts of it already processed.

Loren Pechtel said:
Shadowy Man said:
Your brain seems to skip the instances of the word "of". I know that and yet I missed the last "of".
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

That's because we can control the general area where our eyes looks but the tiny back and forth scanning movements are not under our control. Most of our eye movements when processing visual stimuli, like 90% of all human cognition, are determined by non-conscious processes.

BTW, this has many implications, one of which is that it is rather absurd when people claim they are not impacted by ads or that movies and video games don't impact us because "we know it is fiction". Our brains do not know it is fiction and respond in many ways without our control or awareness as though we are watching a real event or feeling real emotions about those events.
 
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