The mind is man’s most wonderful tool. It seems to operate within a different set of rules than what ordinary reason will suggest. See if you can read the next paragraph.
if yuo can raed tihs, you hvae a sgtrane mnid, too. Can you raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
The research proves a very important point, even though very subtly: the mind sees what it wants to see. That is why when you proofread a document you just wrote you hardly see the errors, because you are reading what you have in mind, not what you wrote. Get someone else to review it, and you are baffled at the number of common errors that are revealed. It’s a trick of the mind. Your ability to read the Cambridge research above is dependent on your experience (what your mind has been conditioned to believe.)
For centuries, people believed that Aristotle was right when he said that the heavier an object, the faster it would fall to earth. Aristotle was regarded as the greatest thinker of all time, and surely he would not be wrong. Anyone, of course, could have taken two objects, one heavy and one light, and dropped them from a great height to see which object would land first. But no one did until nearly 2,000 years after Aristotle's death. Legend has it that in 1589, Galileo summoned learned professors to the base of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Then he went to the top and pushed off a ten-pound and a one-pound weight. Both landed at the same instant. The mind’s perception was so strong, however, that the professors denied their eye’s witness. They continued to insist Aristotle was right.
Old traditions hardly die. It appears we are all incapable of living without bias. We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we want to see them or as we are conditioned to see them. As Covey states in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we see things the way we are. That is perception. The good news is that perception is learnt, meaning that it can be unlearnt as well. What perception do your customers have? Do you need to reinforce it or dismantle it?
No matter what the Cambridge research says, convention still demands that you get your spellings right. Otherwise, the rest of us will consider you ‘stgrane’ and ‘unprfossieanol’.
