Ideally, the algorithm could one day help scientists more fully understand the underlying processing that takes place when people see things. In a nutshell, an image is received, decomposed into color, shape, texture and other attributes and then reassembled, prompting the animal to change its behavior.

The above model is widely accepted in cognitive science and computer science, yet it doesn't make any sense whatsoever — to me at least. To understand what bugs me, assume for a moment that you were seeing your environment by identifying colors, shapes and so on: How do you know a shape is a shape in the first place? Absurd.

The rumor holds that:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Or rather:

According to a research at Cambridge University, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

But as Matt Davis points out, things are slightly more complex than the above statement suggests…