a ykemon ttha serda - (I know you got that right) why? - (Part 1)

What do we read when we read? Why do we feel like we are listening as we do? Why am I reading this with Carl Sagan's voice?

If you are reading this, it is because you know how. It is very likely that since you were around 2 years old your parents read silly tales to you,in books that had silly drawings that they made you look at while you listened. With time, you (we) learned that those things in books were characters, and that they, joined together formed words and that a group of words shaped into sentences.

As we grew up, our parents and teachers showed us how those characters sound depending on the surrounding context (con-text, get it?), and we began to read. A small step for each one of us, a huge leap for humankind.

This way, later, we were able to sit down with a tale of our preference willing , with a lot of effort as we were just starting, to decode what was written. This reading process is, generally speaking, the first one that is taught to children. Under this first approach we learn what we know what phonetic transcription is, where whenever we face a word we take each one of the characters that compose it, seek "how does it sound" under that context (arranging phonemes, the units of sound we use) and rebuild how that word would sound.

Everything looks great, until we come across rather complex words that could've tempted our parents to take us to visit an otorhinolaryngologist, only because, we weren't able to say a word right. of course, an avid reader has no issues with that medical profession's name, but... a child...
Of course, with age and practice our thesaurus increases, widening the gap between people that read at least one book per year from ignorant ones that love to mention that others use "long words".
We change the way we read for another method that is and faster, less dependent on difficulty by length of words: lexical reading, the responsible of our ability to quickly recognize a word with no need to read character by character, veen hewn hte hrtaccasre rea xdemi pu (therefore, the title).

At this point you stop to notice that you've already read a couple of paragraphs that sum up 371 words, without knowing you were moving your eyes all over the screen, this allowed you to focus your eyesight on several different words. Each one of these last between 100 to 300 milliseconds(1/10 to 1/3 of a second each, technically, too fast). Amazing, is to consider that your eyes leaped from focus to focus (from word to word) at an incredibly high speed, yet, you didn't see everything blurry, like those videos you film with your phone when you've drank too much.

This is, because our brain pauses the data acquisition as it detects that we are moving our eyes. We love you, gooey thing that has perfectly adapted to be our adaptive advantage!

You may ask yourself, "why do we need to move our eyes at all? We can see the whole panorama already!"
First, because we can't. We do not see the whole panorama, our brain is a compulsive liar. Crazy, just like when you want to believe that your friend wants to bang you, but at a less sexual level.

As weird as it sounds, we cannot see everything in a single glance. Rephrasing: we cannot acquire quality data from our surroundings without moving our eyes a bit. Basically, because our eyes are not cameras, instead of having a light sensor that captures 50 million tera-pixels they have a retina full of photosensitive cells, but distributed in a heterogeneous pattern.

We do not posses a single type of "light sensor", we've 3 (or 4) types of "cones" and one kind of "rod".

Cones and rods make everything a lot different. While each one of the cones reacto to a different color of light, the canes react to the exact same light, but they've the advantage of being way more sensitive. Briefing, one gives you high definition information about color, but need a lot of light, while others give us a lot more info about the light, but less color info, this, perfectly explains why:

In the dark, all cats are black.

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I'm feeling kind of ill today, so you'll have to wait for the second part tomorrow (I already have a sketch, but I'm not in the mood to do anything).

Stay tuned!