Your Eyes are Lying to You

We’ve all done it. Written an email, looked it over, sent it out, and at the very moment it disappears from our screen into the ether, we realize…TYPO! We’ve misspelled the person’s name or put the wrong date or made some other obvious and totally unnecessary error. 

Last year, I sent an email to my colleagues reminding them that we were having a meeting on Tuesday. As soon as I sent the message, people started replying, “But I thought the meeting was on Tuesday?” And I replied, “Yeah, that’s what I said!” Then my officemate started giggling: “Did you look at what you sent?” “No,” I answered, starting to worry. Then I opened up my “Sent” message. I had typed “Wednesday”. 

How embarrassing for me and confusing for my colleagues! 

It has happened to all of us.

Why does this happen? Because, as Stanislaus Dehaene writes in his book Reading in the Brain, “What we see depends on what we think we’re seeing.”

Our eyes take in a lot of information that our brain has to convert into the picture we experience as sight. And so there’s a gap between what our eyes are actually seeing and what we think we are seeing. 

You know this. 

You have two eyes. Have you ever seen two separate pictures? Hopefully, no. That’s because your brain edits those two pictures together into the one you “see.” You also know that each eye can see a little bit of your nose. And if you start trying to see your nose, your brain will show you that little bit, even though most of the time, it edits your nose out of your experience. 

What does this mean for writing? Well, our brain is constantly showing us what it thinks we want to see. We’ve trained it to show us particular things. Like when we’re reading, we are almost always focusing on meaning. Our brain sees a word, quickly identifies the word in a visual processing region, throws that image over to a sound processing region where we can “hear” the image, and then tosses the image and sound together over to a meaning center where we understand the idea conveyed by the image/sound. This is a complicated process that is mostly unconscious. 

Every once in a while, it becomes conscious when we stare at a word too long and are suddenly struck by its absurdity. Tree, tree, tree, tree, tree, etc. How could those letters, that sound, mean the tall thing with green leaves?

So, how are you going to overcome this gap between what you have written and what you think you wrote? 

1.     Wait at least 15 minutes after writing to revise and/or send your message.

2.     If you can’t wait 15 minutes, ask someone else to look at it for you.

3.     Use all of your senses! Read out loud and touch the screen with your finger or a pen.

4.     Have your computer read your work to you using the “Read Aloud” feature in word or similar features in other programs.