Reading from Memory

It’s an interesting fact about reading that sometimes—maybe even many times—our brains don’t actually read an entire word, but instead look at pieces of a word to jump to a conclusion about what that word is.

I read the book Double Star by Robert Heinlein with two of my seventh grade classes. The protagonist, Lorenzo, must impersonate a famous politician named “Bonforte.” But here’s the thing: I didn’t see the word as it was spelled. My eyes may have seen the word “Bonforte” but what my brain believed it read was the word “Bonaforte.” As I read aloud, I pronounced it “Bon-a-fort.” As I discussed the book’s vying political factions, I wrote the name on the board and spelled it “Bonaforte.” I drew connections between the name Bonaforte and Bonaparte.

Weeks later, I was absent for a period of two days and a substitute teacher corrected the kids during class, telling them the name wasn’t “Bonaforte,” but “Bonforte.” Even after I came back and the kids said, “The sub told us you were pronouncing it wrong,” I didn’t process what they were telling me. Then one day, as I sat down to read and looked at the book, I saw the word “Bonforte” where I expected to see “Bonaforte.”

“That’s weird,” I thought. “There was an ‘a’ in the middle of it before. I wonder if that’s a typo.” I looked for other instances of Bonforte and found them spelled without the ‘a.’ I thought, “Maybe they printed it wrong during the first half of the book.” I looked back and found that no, they had never written the name with an extra ‘a.’

Somehow, I had mis-read the word; afterwards I simply relied on my memory to fill in the word as I read.

Around the time I found myself attempting to explain how I had completely mis-read a name in front of two groups of seventh graders, NPR ran a news story on a scientific study titled, “Congenital Blindness Improves Semantic and Episodic Memory,” published in Behavioral Brain Research Vol. 244, May, 2013. While the gist of the study is none-too-surprising (i.e., those individuals blind since birth have a better ability to remember what they hear), there was a component to the results that intrigued me, and possibly related to the very reason I hadn’t read Bonaforte, er, I mean Bonforte correctly.

In a summary of the study, dailymail explained, “Research has shown we often recall words related to those we actually hear. For example, hearing the words chimney, cigar and fire could trigger a false memory of the word smoke.” The abstract for the study explains it with a bit more scientificospeak:

Participants study lists of words that are all semantically related to a lure that is not presented. Subsequently, participants frequently recall the missing lure. We found that congenitally blind participants have enhanced memory performance for recalling the presented words and reduced false memories for the lure.

What most intrigues me about the study is how our memories can leap to a conclusion that did not exist. The “missing lure”—an omitted concept that is thematically related to the presented words—becomes present in our memories because our brains intuit that it was present. This remarkable feature of the human brain appears to be a symptom of sighted people. Sight takes up a large part of the brain’s processing, and at the same time, sight relies to a great degree on memory. Rather than seeing the same thing time after time, the brain processes sights and fills in the details using memory.

This reminds me of a passage from the young adult novel, Thunder Cave by Roland Smith. It’s a book I read with numerous classes when I taught sixth grade. In the book, the main character, Jacob Lansa, is learning about “seeing” from a Maasai named Supeet:

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

“I will teach you to see,” he said. “It will take you some time to understand and perhaps you never will. That is up to you.”

“I’m willing to learn,” I said.

“Good,” Supeet said. “You must first stop looking at things the way you have looked at them in the past. You must see things with new eyes. The land has a language of its own and to see you must understand that language. There is a difference between seeing something the first time and seeing it the second time. For instance, when you come to a town that you have not seen before you pay close attention. The second time you go to that town you see less because you look at what is familiar.”

I hadn’t thought about this before, but what he was saying was true. The train from New York City to Poughkeepsie passed through many towns. the first time I made the trip with my parents I paid close attention. I’d look at buildings and houses, wondering what was going on inside them. The second and third trips, I paid less attention to what was passing by. On the last trip to see Taw I had barely glanced out the window.

“I think I understand,” I said.

Supeet continued. “Each time you see something, no matter how familiar you are with it, try to see it as if it were new. Try to pick out what has changes since you saw it last. Nothing stays the same—it may look the same, but it is always different. The reason it looks the same is because you are looking at your memory of it—not at what it is.

Smith captures exactly the reliance of seeing on memory. The brain is basically lazy, or if you will, thrifty. It can expend energy to see, but when possible, it conserves the energy and fills in details by retrieving them from memory. In this way the brain is like an internet browser that loads data locally from a cache rather than waiting for the data to download over the internet. And this is why sighted readers are more likely to have imperfect memories about words they listen to: the brain of sighted people relies on memory.

But that’s not all the brain relies on. If you’ve ever had an e-mail account, chances are you’ve seen the received the following:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl 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.

You can find out a whole lot about this pseudo-study at http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/, but the one thing I take away from it is that scientists have a lot of theories about how the brain reads (for example, “they propose a model of word recognition in which each word is split in half since the information at the retina is split between the two hemispheres of the brain when we read”), but we still aren’t sure how it does what it does.

I remember visiting the Bristol Renaissance Faire one summer as a sixteen or seventeen year old. A group of us stood in the tent of a vendor, oohing and ahhing over the metal miniatures he had created. The entire Fellowship of the Ring sat before us on a plank table, cast in lead (or pewter or whatever the heck they make miniatures out of). The craftsman talked about Gandalf and Frodo and finally pointed out, “Striker.”

We knew what he meant, despite the heretical nature of his utterance: when he said “Striker” he really meant, “Strider.” But my good friend Jamie wasn’t going to let that sin go. His passion for accuracy was stronger than his common sense.

“Don’t you mean, ‘Strider’?” he asked.

The vendor looked up from whatever he was doing—polishing a spoon, casting a miniature, filing the edge of a deadly weapon—and he stared at Jamie for a silent moment in which each of us felt that perhaps correcting the guy whose work we had just been praising was probably overstepping the whole respect your elders admonition. His response held all the rigidity of a metal file: “You say it your way, I’ll say it mine,” he said.

Did he really read the entire Lord of the Rings with a character named “Striker”? If so, the connotations carried by that character are entirely different than those conveyed by “Strider.” As an eight year old I read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, pronouncing the name “Eustace” as “Estes,” but that was pronunciation, and neither of those names in-and-of-themselves had meanings to me (except Estes was the name of a model rocket company). Contrast that with Striker versus Strider: Striker says, “I attack!” while Strider says, “I walk great lengths.”

To me, extended mis-readings of this sort are a side effect of the way our brain reads, which includes jumping to a conclusion about the word based on a variety of factors, such as the letters the brain takes the energy to process, the context of the words surrounding it, and our own expectations about what the word should be. Mis-reads of this type are typically caught and corrected (or never caught in the first place) individually, but in my case, I read publicly, which meant that I found this processing scotoma worth taking some time to write about here.

Have you ever mis-read a word and it became clear at a later instant, forcing you to reassess your reading? What was that experience like? Feel free to leave me a comment below.