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Have any of you ever been asked this question:

Wht mks t s tht y cn stll rd ths sntnc vn thgh thr r n vwls n t? 

I, for one, had always read things like this and thought about how silly they were (and promptly deleted them). However, it was in Thursday’s class that I actually realized how incredibly smart this is and what it implies about the dynamics of our vision. Essentially, what you do is remove all of the vowels from a sentence or a paragraph. The amazing thing is that you are still perfectly capable of understanding what you have read despite the fact that you are only reading a bunch of consonants. The sentence above (in case you didn’t get it) is ‘what makes it so that you can read this sentence even though there are no vowels in it?’ This is a very good question, and I feel as though Thursday’s discussion allowed me to better comprehend this phenomenon.  

 By looking at the nature of the retina and the difference between the image on the retina and the image in our head, we were able to infer that our brain fills in what it believes there should be. In the same way, therefore, that the brain fills in the holes (from where there are no photoreceptors in the retina) in the picture in your head, can your brain fill in the ‘holes’ left by the vowels in words? What we can take from this example is that words are not read letter by letter; rather we recognize words as wholes, and the absence of vowels does not reduce the understanding of our text. Another interesting question that this brings up is what role the I-function plays in reading. It would seem that by automatically filling in vowels when you are reading a sentence like the one above, you are essentially interpreting things which have nothing to do with the information that is coming from your eye. In the same way that unbeknownst to you, your brain is adding visual images that are absent on the retina, is there a part of your brain or nervous system which is creating the experience of reading whole words even though that experience is non-existent?