A friend sent me this email, see if you can read it...=)

ONLY GREAT MINDS CAN READ THIS
This is weird, but interesting!

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny
55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at
Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod
are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit
a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot
slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it

So spelling isn't as important for reading as esthethics.....

I dsiagere, sellpnig eeez vrey impohtent

No problem, Zhann ... but then I'm borderline dyslexic ... LOL

But there is another aspect missing, the fact that it also depends on context being present. It's not a problem to read the email because the mind is also following the flow of the sentence. But if you were to take every word and randomly misplace it, then it becomes more challenging.

Anyway, the same concept the email exposes is true for many other things, like have you ever read a title of a movie or a book with weird fonts, like an A not looking like an A because some artist thought to get cleaver to make an A look fancy? Imagine the NASA logo with the A's not having the horizontal bar, or the old 1980's logo for the TV show "Airwolf" with the center of the world cut out. The mind fills in the blanks, replacing missing letters or oddly shaped letters into something it knows should be there.

Further into this, in the realm of Robotics, a few years ago computer scientists discovered that the human eye (or area of brain that deals with sight) seem to have it's own processing areas that fills in details. Like... for instance, when you enter a room you don't have to look at all the room to see the basic details of the room... the eye/brain puts things together.

This is a cool email :-)

read it just fine/even backwards

I take it my brain decompiles info ok to some extent and has pretty decent error correction.

If u cn rd this, u r 2 close. :^)

as long as the 1st and last letters are 'right', it can be read...seen something like this before.

yeah, someone posted something like this a while ago.

55 out of 100 people, who?  What age group, nationality, education level?  
Yes it is not hard to read.  Brains are great pattern recogition machines, and they never cease to amaze me.    

These days I am really on the lookout for statistics that don't cite sources and that don't define their sample groups.  This is just a simple email, but you would be amazed at how often statistics and numbers are used in the media that are incorrect/incomplete. 

I've seen this kind of thing before and I agree with DAM.

Wait! there's something wrong with the sentence?

I read it just fine.  WOW  It looked like a jumbled mess until I started, then it just rolled off my tongue.

the faster i read the easier it was - wierd !!!

I could read it just fine.  More about pattern recognition ... there was a special on the tube recently that dealt with the human brain imposing patterns on things that do not necessarily have a pattern.

For example, seeing the man in the moon, or the face on Mars, or taking an upside down image of a really screwed up "face" and being able to recognize the person that was originally depicted (I think it was Lincoln that they used, and if you turned the image right side up, you could see how goofy the image looked .... all sorts of errors in it).

Our minds are really interesting machines.

@ rickymaveety: That is creepy! I'm reminded of the childhood memories of finding face patterns of things in the bedroom wallpaper and when a hotel room I once stayed in had an old fashion wardrobe. It was a big wooden thing with a flower motif carved in, but if the light was just right it was like a face or skull was looking back at me. It was an old hotel too..... wooden statues in the hallway.. dimly lit hallway... reminded me of a ghost story involving my uncle.. which were strange and creepy and probabl true (in my humble opinion.) Anyway, that gives me the shivers.  Patterns in the wallpaper is the worse!

@Death at Midnight ...

You should read this article (if you get a few minutes).  http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/13/news/faces.php

I think they will eventually find that many people (and probably most people) also see text and other "patterns" holistically.   Just as you don't look at an eye, and then another eye ... then a nose ... and realize it's a face ... you don't see each letter individually and then decide what the word is .... there's a self correction going on in the brain that does its best to impose a logic to whatever pattern the brain perceives.

I wish I could find that odd visual puzzle ... it was really fascinating, but I can't for the life of me remember whether I saw it on the net or in a magazine.  Oh well.

Sometimes I get ideas for random cartoon characters and weird stuff by looking at random floor or wall patterns. I guess I'm not the only one wierd like that, huh?

That article is interesting. A few years ago I got some emails from friends in Thailand who were all spooked from a black-n-white photo being based in an email of some people splashing around under a waterfall.. but there was an evil looking face in the falling water. Another email spooked them because of a photo off of Bangkok of a reflection in a car window which looked ghostly.

Very good article. Thanks for linking it.