Why This Shirt Works:
Where are the "f's"?
In the last ten years thousands of web pages have sprung up and countless mass emails have circled the globe, all with the following nearly identical text:
Read this sentence:
The focus of this illusion
is to quantify the number
of f's on the entire
front of this shirt.
Now count the F's in that sentence. Count them only once, only once: do not go back and count them again.
After you are done, scroll down to see the answer.
Answer:
There are seven F's in the sentence, but nine on the shirt. One in Noggin Fodder vertically and remember the entire design is a large F.
The "average" person finds four.
If you spotted five to six, you're ABOVE AVERAGE.
If you got above six, you can turn your nose at most anybody!
If you counted all nine, you're a GENIUS.
One reason you may have missed counting all Six is your brain does not process the "F" in "OF". The word is pronounced "OV".
It's a great trick, and very entertaining to watch someone try again and again to find 6 F's once they know the answer. But could it be true that your brain does not process one half of the letters in the word "OF"? Wouldn't we have a lot of trouble reading if our brains missed so much of such a common word?
Unfortunately, the origins of the email are lost in cyberspace. And a good explanation for the phenomenon is hard to come by on the internet. Most people are content to know they can't process an "F" when it sounds like a "V". Discussions of the phenomenon by purported linguists reveal a few interesting explanations, but no definitive answer. Based on what can be garnered from internet discussion boards:
While it is likely that the pronunciation of "OF" as "UV" plays a role, there seems to be much more going on here. Much like what's behind the Stroop Effect, reading (for fluent readers) is a nearly automatic process for our brains which are powerful parallel processors. This simply means they are very good at doing multiple things simultaneously. To accomplish this the brain has to simplify and automate tasks where and when it can. One place it simplifies in reading is to "gloss over" the common words that are necessary for sentence structure but are non-lexical. Lexical words can be represented by a picture (cat, house, run). Non-lexical words (of, the, a) exist only for grammatical use, so our brains don't spend much time thinking about them. Essentially, our brains spend so little time on the word "of", that they don't register the word, let alone the "f". Interestingly, non-English speakers are able to find the "F's" more easily than English speakers. If you've ever tried to read or speak another language you will understand that it takes a lot more mental effort because all of the automatic brain functions we take for granted with our native languages don't happen. |
