Off topic: How many F's can you count? Thread poster: Nesrin
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Nesrin 
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:59
English to Arabic
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This is a seemingly very simple test which was sent to me - I find it so inexplicable!
Read the following statement quickly, counting all the letters F in the statement:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF MANY YEARS.
How many did you find?
Actually, there are 6 Fs. Apparently, most people find 3 or 4. I found 4. The thing is that the brain usually... See more This is a seemingly very simple test which was sent to me - I find it so inexplicable!
Read the following statement quickly, counting all the letters F in the statement:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF MANY YEARS.
How many did you find?
Actually, there are 6 Fs. Apparently, most people find 3 or 4. I found 4. The thing is that the brain usually overlooks the "OF"s because they aren't nouns and because the letter isn't pronounced f but v.
The strange thing is that I did the test again today, KNOWING where the trick is, and I STILL only got 4!
The test was sent out to a number of friends, and interestingly, those who are not very proficient in English all found 6 Fs (that is not to say that if you find 6 you're not proficient in English - you may just be a genius!)
[Edited at 2006-10-31 14:50] ▲ Collapse
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Actually I already knew this and I knew there was the trick of the "of", but when I did it the first time I also counted 6.
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Erik Freitag
Germany
Local time: 14:59
Member (2006)
Dutch to German
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I counted 6, but English is not my native language. So it does seem to make a difference...
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Nesrin
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:59
English to Arabic
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TOPIC STARTER | Ok then, maybe language professionals are an exception! | Oct 31, 2006 |
But what does that say about me? 
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texjax DDS PhD
Local time: 08:59
Member (2006)
English to Italian
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Nesrin!
I obtained the same results as you. Amazing!
Should we be worried?
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| I saw only 2! | Oct 31, 2006 |
At first glance I only spotted 2 F's!!!
and I pride myself on my eye for details...
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| Proofreading pitfalls | Oct 31, 2006 |
texjax DDS PhD wrote: Nesrin! I obtained the same results as you. Amazing! Should we be worried?
For proofreading your own texts - yes! The brain just sees what it wants (or rather: expects) to see. I.e. the more familiar you are with the content of a text, the less likely you are to spot typos.
Once I had to work on a computer without a spellchecker installed. The translation was a short press release around 4-500 words. I read through the text carefully and slowly five times to make sure there were no typos, just to find one - in the company's name of all places - plastered all over the Internet later. Totally embarrassing!
The brain is even more unpredictable than that. Once I was studying a restaurant menu for a particular dish I knew was a specialty of that restaurant. My brain therefore expected to find the specific word (boxty); however, I simply couldn't find this item. I repeatedly read the word as "broth" (ie. chicken broth instead of chicken boxty) for some unexplicable reasons (maybe chicken broth as the more common collocation got preference?), and I had the visual graphic image of the words printed in green on the light yellow background spelling out "broth" clearly in front of my eyes. I would have sworn under oath that the first item on the list was chicken broth. Scanning the menu for the third or fourth time finaly showed me "boxty". Absolutely weird! There's just no relying on what your brain tells you.
There was an interesting article a few days ago in the German Spiegel on the unreliability of memories and how easily they can be manipulated. I also remember from the past an experiment on the (un)reliability of eyewitnesses. The image of a yellow car combined with the image of a blue car perceived in a clip with a number of events in quick sequence resulted in a remembered green car!
For anyone producing text that means that the safest way is to have somebody else proofread your texts. I've also heard that reading your text backwards helps, since the words then follow in an unfamiliar and non-semantic order and the brain can focus more on the actual letters. For this reason, it's also good to let your text rest for as long as possible before the final proofreading session.
[Edited at 2006-10-31 16:38]
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but I am non-english and in my language "f" is pronounced as an "f".
Heike said:
"I also remember from the past an experiment on the (un)reliability of eyewitnesses. The image of a yellow car combined with the image of a blue car perceived in a clip with a number of events in quick sequence resulted in a remembered green car!"
which reminded me the movie "Memento", one of my favourites, which is about memory/lost of memory..
 ... See more but I am non-english and in my language "f" is pronounced as an "f".
Heike said:
"I also remember from the past an experiment on the (un)reliability of eyewitnesses. The image of a yellow car combined with the image of a blue car perceived in a clip with a number of events in quick sequence resulted in a remembered green car!"
which reminded me the movie "Memento", one of my favourites, which is about memory/lost of memory..
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Özden Arıkan
Germany
Local time: 14:59
Member
English to Turkish
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Because... since this is presented as a sort of trick, I guess I knew that I had to pay particular attention to... what? The of's of course
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...I'm not mother tongue but I have a fast way of reading (grasping groups of words in one glance, considering the longer ones and disregarding the "and"/"of"/"is" etc...), so I only found 3....
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Özden Arıkan wrote: Because... since this is presented as a sort of trick, I guess I knew that I had to pay particular attention to... what? The of's of course
I found 6 for the same reason. If I had not been aware it was a trick, I might not have found them all.
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Ivana UK
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:59
Member (2005)
Italian to English
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| It's been a while since I've seen this test! | Nov 1, 2006 |
Although somewhere at the back of my mind I knew the answer was 6, I counted the F's and got only 3.
I tried again and got 3 again - but I tend to "scan" rather than read and EN is my mothertongue, so that comes as no surprise!
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Heinrich Pesch
Finland
Local time: 15:59
Member (2003)
Finnish to German
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but then I used the fingers of my left hand.
Cheers
Heinrich
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