I haven’t blogged for a while, and I feel a bit out the habit. Something caught my attention recently and I just thought I’d make a little post about it to try and pick up the thread again.
I’d started making a fairly consistent typo, and I was a bit puzzled by it. Every time I typed or wrote ‘research’ I would for no apparently good reason spell it ‘reasearch’. This appeared to come out of nowhere.
Then the other day, it came to me. I was filling out a record in a database I use most days at work. There’s a field on this database where the options are ‘research’ or ‘reference’, and I made the typo.
Say the two words to yourself for a moment and think about the first syllables and how they’re spelled. Depending on your accent, you may or may not notice much substantial difference in the sounds; but I often say them ‘reee-search’ and ‘refrince’. I speculate; but I wonder if in my brain somewhere there was suddenly an issue with these circumstantially co-located words, having the same spelling but a different sound. And I wonder if my brain then felt the need to compensate for the discrepancy and stuck and ‘a’ in after the ‘e’ in research.
This research/reference wrinkle was beginning to get to me around the same time as the Royal Institute advent lectures on the topic of chromosomes started, and it was great to bump into chromosome 7 and the FOXP2 gene that humans share with song birds. It’s thought to be what makes us and the songbirds share sophisticated, variable and alterable communication.
#RiAdvent 7: http://youtu.be/I0J0WqssIqo
Being able to learn and react to language, and make changes to one's own usage are amazing brain plasticity experiences. And since I’ve been thinking about this, I appear to have stopped making the mistake, like I’ve been able to fix the mistake in my head just by paying it some attention.