Ok, I got this forwarded to me via email, and I was wondering if anyone can help me out.
Here is the exact text:
Hopefully this is off the page, but anyways, the answer is 6. I personally said 3. The email said that most people say 3 because the brain can’t process ‘of’. Now that I read the bottom, it’s really obvious, but why in the world did I miss ‘of’ the first time?
Anyone know the reason why ‘of’ would be missed? Thanks!
There is a theory that small, common words (eg prepositions) are recognised as a unit by the eye/brain, rather than as being made up of their constituent letters. Thus, you’ll tend to miss those Fs. I’ll have a hunt for a cite
I have to admit, I counted only three Fs the first time through. :smack:
There’s a discussion about it here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linguistics/message/5460
My own pet theory is that it’s partly due to the preposition factor, and partly because the opening two words (“Finished files”) have a very strong “F” sound at the beginning, which conditions your brain to look for similar sounds in the rest of the sentence. In contrast, “Of” has an unstressed “V” sound, so as you read through in your head you miss them.
Here’s another discussion about this phenomenon from New Scientist.
http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/article.jsp?id=lw355
I was slightly put out by the sentence “An intelligent seven-year-old or a proofreader would read six Fs, because they have learned to give all words equal values.” I am a sub-editor by profession, and guess how many Fs I saw when I first encountered this little puzzle?
(Hint: it wasn’t six.)
I saw this one before (a different sentence though) so I counted 5. Missed one of the 'of’s.
I think it’s because letters only register when you pronouce them. ‘of’ begins with the ‘o’ sound and is thus not registered. try it with other words.
I always start at the end and move my eyes backwards through the paragraph. Eliminates the recognition of a word and the resulting brain confusion with the “v” sound in “of”.
!kcor uoy ,lliBelcnU
There’s no point to recognizing all the letters in a word if you are reading.
That’s part of the point of phonics, ya know.
If you have to count letters or proof all the numbers in a table, I suggest going backwards and using a ruler. Slow and geeky wins the race.
I’ve seen this many times. In group settings it is interesting to see how adamantly people defend their answer.
The first time I saw this I got it right, but only because I did the proofreading trick of going backwards, as UncleBill and j.c. suggested.
It has always been explained to me that the reason people miss the "f"s in “of” is because of the way it is pronounced… as “ov”. While this makes sense and explains the results, from a cognitive perception point of view it seems strange to me that when the instructions are to search for a particular shape, the brain would actually search for a sound.
Sometimes we
we only see what
what we expect to
to see
Thanks for the replys, just wanted to share this, passed it around the office, a few people got 6, a couple got 5 (I have no idea) and a few others got 3. However, I sent this to my friend that is Indian but speaks English pretty well, and he got 6 without a problem. He actually does pronounce the ‘F’ in ‘of’ though.
He was also saying that he’s noticed that Americans (at least around here) leave out quite a few letters when pronouncing words, and that’s why it was hard for him to get used to the English spoken here compared to the English spoken in India.
Anyway, our minds are very strange things…
I counted five too, and you know why? The “F” in ‘Scientific’ is buried three-quarters of the way into the word, and my eye missed it.
Want something similar, but occuring in real life? Here’s the headline from a recent quarterly publication of the Queens Library:
“Queens Library Unites with Mayor Bloomberg, New York Public and Brooklyn Public Libraries for Pubic/Private Partnership”
Besides being a tounge-twister of a sentence, did you spot the misspelled/misplaced word? Took me three tries…
I caught it right away, but I think only because someone in another thread said s/he always misspells that word.
I didn’t look at the OP because I know the trick, I think I got 4-5 the first time. I do know that many people who are not native Enlgish speakers tend to get it correct. Motorcycle Safety Classes do something similar, they put two 'the’s together and most people miss it.
postcards is right … the people who count five are generally missing the F in scientific
Yep. I counted five. When I went back and recounted, it was the f in scientific I missed.
I was first presented with this exercise in my seventh grade band class. Most of us (myself included) only counted three Fs on the initial reading. The point of this exercise was to emphasize that when playing a complex piece of music, one has to watch for the “little” notes as well as the bigger notes. In other words, we shouldn’t read music in the same manner as we read text.
The first time I saw this, I think I got five, because I was on the lookout for those tricky "of"s, but I missed one of them. I think it was the last one, in “experience of years”: The first two are close together, which makes them more noticeable.