Sorry in advance for the following wall of text, but it’s a fascinating topic that aligns with what I studied at university (computational linguistics):
In neuroscience, that feeling you had is descibed by the term P600. It happens because your brain assumes correctness and re-reads the sentence to try and figure out different connections between the words. Then it eventually stops and realizes that the sentence must be incorrect. This ceases brain activity in some areas for a short time which leads to a measurable, positive brain potential. The process takes around 600 milliseconds, hence the name P600.
Another big and sudden brain potential change is the N400, an increase in brain activity (neurons firing means electrons moving, thus negative) with an on-set about 400ms after the stimulus. This usually occurs if the sentence is gramatically correct but subverts your expectation of what’s coming next, so the brain re-reads parts of the sentence to check if there is something you missed. An example would be a sentence like “After a relaxing sunbath, Jane strolled through the old town center and went to the cigarette factory.” The continuation is unusal and thus you feel like you missed some important information. When reading a word, your brain essentially loads information and predicts what could come next, which is called priming. “Dog” would for example prime contexts like animal, tail, waggle, pet, bark, etc. There is no exact list of course and it’s an individual trait but there is significant overlap between people.
If you enjoy that tingly feeling, you can mix these 2 phenomena together and look up “garden-path sentences”. Those are gramatically correct sentences that are hard to read because they use words with unusual grammatical roles. The prominent example is “The old man the boat”, where man instead of being in the common noun phrase “old man” is instead attached to the more unusual meaning of to board a boat.
Sorry for the rambling and thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
I never expected that my neurons could feel like a seriously twisted broken leg, but you did it. Congratulations.
Sorry in advance for the following wall of text, but it’s a fascinating topic that aligns with what I studied at university (computational linguistics):
In neuroscience, that feeling you had is descibed by the term P600. It happens because your brain assumes correctness and re-reads the sentence to try and figure out different connections between the words. Then it eventually stops and realizes that the sentence must be incorrect. This ceases brain activity in some areas for a short time which leads to a measurable, positive brain potential. The process takes around 600 milliseconds, hence the name P600.
Another big and sudden brain potential change is the N400, an increase in brain activity (neurons firing means electrons moving, thus negative) with an on-set about 400ms after the stimulus. This usually occurs if the sentence is gramatically correct but subverts your expectation of what’s coming next, so the brain re-reads parts of the sentence to check if there is something you missed. An example would be a sentence like “After a relaxing sunbath, Jane strolled through the old town center and went to the cigarette factory.” The continuation is unusal and thus you feel like you missed some important information. When reading a word, your brain essentially loads information and predicts what could come next, which is called priming. “Dog” would for example prime contexts like animal, tail, waggle, pet, bark, etc. There is no exact list of course and it’s an individual trait but there is significant overlap between people.
If you enjoy that tingly feeling, you can mix these 2 phenomena together and look up “garden-path sentences”. Those are gramatically correct sentences that are hard to read because they use words with unusual grammatical roles. The prominent example is “The old man the boat”, where man instead of being in the common noun phrase “old man” is instead attached to the more unusual meaning of to board a boat.
Sorry for the rambling and thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
I really enjoyed your post! Thanks!
As did I!
Please do more ted talks. That was fascinating
Glad you enjoyed it <3