
Why does the the human mind ignore the second "the"? - dsr12
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ze4ca/eli5_why_does_the_the_human_mind_ignore_the/
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Udo
> " _Your eyes actually take in multiple words at a time and parse the
> sentence based on the words you 've taken in. This also means that unless a
> particular particle is deadly important to the sentence, your brain ignores
> it_"

I have a hunch that's not actually what's going on, the second "the" gets
filtered out way earlier, before it even reaches the higher features of
language processing: to compensate for the constant jittering and shifting of
the eye's focus, our pattern recognition modules need to navigate by close-by
features in order to build up a model of what we see. In reading mode, the
second "the" never even makes it to language processing because it gets
filtered out during error correction as an eye-alignment error.

I imagine the pseudo code backtrace would be something like this: "I saw a
'the' shape" > "move focus to next position on the right" > "still seeing the
'the' shape" > "move focus to next position on the right".

So unless you decide to consciously process the line, or your visual system
explicitly learns to recognize a 'the the' pattern, the data simply never gets
passed along.

~~~
ghayes
When you consider the fact that you experience the

the effect even across multiple lines, then this

explanation really doesn't sound as likely. Or, what

you're saying is correct, just applied one layer up.

~~~
fao_
In your sentence I found the second 'the' to be much more apparent than in the
the original.

~~~
36bydesign
Clever.

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tzs
We also ignore minor instances of this kind of error in speech (such as mild
stuttering), which makes me skeptical of the explanations based on how eyes
move during reading or otherwise specific to written language.

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tome
I was certain that when I clicked through I'd see the repeated "the". Then I
pressed the back button having experienced a revelation.

~~~
Misker
Beat me to it.

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userbinator
Maybe the fact that I probably spend as much if not more time at work reading
source code than I do English has changed something about the way I read,
because I immediately saw the second "the". Then again, it could be because
I've taught programming before, and that made me be more aware of things like
this:

    
    
        for(i = 0; i < 10; i++);
            a[i] = i;

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dullcrisp
I just caught myself reading the title again as I was scanning the front page,
and I actually found that I started reading it at middle where the interesting
words are: "the human mind ignore...", and only momentarily glanced back at
"Why does" for framing once I had already started reading.

So to perhaps needlessly expand on what /u/TyrannicalDuck said
algorithmically, rather than reading the words in a sentence from left to
right, you glance at a sentence, estimate which parts will give you the most
understanding the most quickly, start reading those, updating which parts you
need to focus on next based on the information you've taken in, always
focussing on the most salient parts of what you're reading, and when you
estimate that you've understood that part of the sentence well enough,
immediately move on to the next part. Probably similar to how the human eye
takes in anything. So the articles are only given focus when skimming has
failed entirely.

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lowlevel
I feel this has something to do with with the way the brain processes the
images from both eyes filtering out overlap/differing perspective from each
eye to make a single image. The second the seems to be more noticable to me if
I close one eye... Of course now that I know its there that is probably
skewing the results...

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kenshaw
This is a language issue. We ignore it in English, because it's a widely
encountered error. In other languages, such as those that repeat for
indicating plural (ie, the Malay family of languages), this would be glaring
to speakers of that other language.

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gaur
This HN submission is just enabling a game of telephone by inviting people
with no expertise to say what they "think" or "feel" in response to people on
reddit with no expertise saying what they "think" or "feel". Garbage in,
garbage out.

~~~
soared
Welcome to reddit. IMO default subs shouldn't be linked on hn except in very
rare occasions.

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Fjolsvith
I actually ignored the first "the".

