We've come to expect a daily dose of Internet spam—and of intriguing comments and jokes from friends (today I was electronically asked if Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks, and whatever happened to Preparations A through G?).

The terribly misspelled paragraph below has similarly been zipping around the Internet recently. Perhaps you've received it and wondered how you could read it so easily.

Aoccdrnig to rseerach at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

PS: Hwo'd yuo lkie to run tihs by yuor sepll ckehcer?

A regular reader of this column asked me to explain the phenomenon, and so I thought I'd explain it to all curious BrainConnection readers.

The point of this line of research is that proficient readers read most words (except very long ones) principally through the first and last letters and a rapid recognition of the general shape and content of the entire word. That's why we typically read misspelled words with no trouble.

We can also easily read both cursive and block writing, different fonts (including fonts we rarely see), and words with mixed capital and small letters. We also easily distinguish between words like eight and sight that have only one subtle spelling difference but are pronounced very differently.