If You Can Read These Words Out Loud, Your Mind Is Sharp AF!
Your brain may be stronger than you think.
I’m going to come clean — I love all these quizzes, tests, and astrology pieces. I love anything that will give me some insight into myself.
Who has a secret crush on me? I better find out and take that Facebook test. What Adele song tells my story? What was the most popular food the year I graduated from college? I do them all. I may not share them, because honestly, do people really need to know what the future is bringing me?
We all enjoy insider information on ourselves, which is why astrology pieces are so popular. Do any of these things really offer any insights into our personalities or tell us anything we don’t really know? Maybe… possibly… probably not, but they’re still fun. You never know — they could be predicting the future! And who’s to say that if I had my own Justice League, my best friend wouldn’t be in it?
I especially like the quizzes or tests that actually take skill to do; those make me feel especially smug. I can see the hidden image in the zig-zag or the images in the circle. I must have superpowers.
One of my favorites of these quizzes is from Doctor Dementia, which asks if you can read these words out loud:
7H15 M3554G3
53RV35 7O PR0V3
H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N
D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!
1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5!
1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG
17 WA5 H4RD BU7
N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3
Y0UR M1ND 1S
R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY
W17H0U7 3V3N
7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17,
B3 PROUD! 0NLY
C3R741N P30PL3 C4N
R3AD 7H15!
The meme goes on to say that researchers believe it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and the last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem, since the human mind doesn’t read every letter anyway, but the word as a whole.
However, an article from the MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit suggests that while some of that statement is correct, there are some things that aren’t.
For instance, the first and last letter aren’t the only thing you use when reading some text. If this were true, then how could you tell the difference between pairs of words like “salt” and “slat?” None of the words that have reordered letters create other words, and when you read jumbled text like this, it slows your reading speed down by 11 percent.
In the end, does being able to decipher this really mean that your chances for dementia are diminished? The results are inconclusive. We do know that any kind of brain teaser does help with memory and reasoning skills, so while you’re feeling like a genius because you can read this kind of text, know that you’re exercising and strengthening your brain at the same time.
Now I’ve got to go take a quiz to find out who is secretly crushing on me.