Mind Hacks - Page 2

When you're reading a sentence, you don't understand it word by word, but rather phrase by phrase. Phrases are groups of words that can be bundled together, and they're related by the rules of grammar. A noun phrase will include nouns and adjectives, and a verb phrase will include a verb and a noun, for example. These phrases are the building blocks of language, and we naturally chunk sentences into phrase blocks just as we chunk visual images into objects.

What this means is that we don't treat every word individually as we hear it; we treat words as parts of phrases and have a buffer (a very short-term memory) that stores the words as they come in, until they can be allocated to a phrase. Sentences become cumbersome not if they're long, but if they overrun the buffer required to parse them, and that depends on how long the individual phrases are.

The authors then say to read this sentence:

While Bob ate an apple was in the basket.

The absence of commas or other "buffer" indicators means that you may have to read the sentence a time or two to get it right, simply because the mind parses the first part ("While Bob ate an apple") as one "chunk" of information – but does so incorrectly given the rest of the sentence. This is an excellent example of why proper grammar is so important: rules of grammar are actually designed to help create "phrase boundaries" that assist in properly identifying and processing the information in a sentence.

Other tips, such as why we give certain words to certain things (the so-called "frob-twiddle-tweak continuum"), or how we are capable of missing something like a gorilla running through a group of basketball players just because we've been asked to count the number of passes they make before shooting, or how video games can improve the "attentional mechanisms" that sort and edit visual information, all offer intriguing insights into how we process the incredible array of information around us.

All in all, Mind Hacks is a rewarding mind trip, one that stretches the boundaries of what we know about how the brain works and playfully presents that information in an engaging, thought-provoking way.

Article Author: W.E. Wallo

W.E. Wallo is a book and movie junkie whose writings have appeared in a variety of print and online publications.

Visit W.E. Wallo's author page — W.E. Wallo's Blog