Have you ever noticed that you can read bit of text and think that it has no grammatical or spelling errors, only to have someone point out to you that it does? Then you read it again and it still looks fine? But it still does have errors — that have to be pointed out to you?
This is not an unusual phenomenon.
A NYU study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, reveals that the human brain can detect the basic linguistic structure of a sentence in just 150 milliseconds – nearly the blink of an eye. The brain’s left temporal cortex distinguishes complete sentences from random words in as few as 130 milliseconds. Slight errors in spelling or structure slightly delays this response time, but around 400 milliseconds later it “corrects” the mistakes, interpreting them as valid.
So we finally have a valid excuse. It’s our brain’s fault. It “corrected” the error before we recognized that it was an error.
Now that science has proved that it was not my fault, I can confess to one such “brain-burp” in which I was a major participant.
In addition to sculpture casting at the Desert Crucible, we were at times contracted as well to cast an accompanying bronze plaque that would be mounted near the sculpture and would convey basic information about the sculpture.
In the case in point, we were to cast just a plaque itself, containing in addition to the plaque verbiage a bas-relief of the face and shoulders of the man to whom the plaque was dedicated. We were not naïve about avoiding the dangers of spelling errors and grammatical errors. We had a review system established that included two people reviewing the printed script, the customer signing and dating a copy of the script indicating his/her approval, and two people reviewing the zinc plate used to make the mold.
This was a fairly large plaque for us, as I recall about 26 x30 inches, and it had a lot of verbiage. The lettering was as small as we could use and still expect a good casting result. We took our time and did it right.
The resulting bronze plaque was a work of art and we were all quite pleased with it. The bas-relief translated well, and the verbiage communicated the myriad of public services the man had rendered in his lifetime. It was a fitting memorial.
As we were wrapping it for delivery, I did a double-take at one phrase: “…. Dedicated to his many years of pubic service.”
CRAP!
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