Pictures like this have been circulating on social media for years fooling people into thinking that if they can read the words on the screen then their brains work better than everyone else.
Talk about a confidence boost.
But then the scientists got involved and shattered everyone’s dreams of a high IQ.
Here’s the bad news: everyone can read it. But the good news is from this one sentence, they have found some interesting information about how the brain works.
According to Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a Spanish cognitive scientist, your brain has come to expect letters and so bypasses the number.
“While reading, you don’t pay attention to the difference between a number and a letter because you only expect letters,” he said.
“For your brain, it’s not a number in a word, it’s a wrongly written or strangely written letter.
“You are in this mode of tolerance that allows for small distortions in the identity of the letters.”
Basically, when you’re reading this script, the part of your brain responsible for interpreting numbers isn’t activated and instead construes the number as an oddly-shaped letter, just as it would bad handwriting.
This style of writing is known as the 1337 (or leet) alphabet, commonly used in Internet languages to bypass search engine detection.
Think of all the ‘v1agra’ emails you’ve received.
So, you’re not a genius, but your brain is a code-cracking machine.
Kud05 f0r 7ry1n6!
