Chances are you also understand it.

Chances are you also understand it. It purports that the order of the letters inside a given word doesn't matter, as long as the first and last letters of each word are in the right place.
You can read the words because the human mind reads words as a whole, and not letter-by-letter.
Well, that's what it says. But while it's entertaining and ego-boosting (that is, if you can read it), it ain't exactly so.
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The e-mail, while partially correct in its overall hypohsetis — um, hypothesis — is "very irresponsible in several important ways," says Denis Pelli, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University.
First of all — oops — there was never a study done at Cambridge University. And therein lies a tale.
The e-mail was originally sent around without mentioning Cambridge; it got added after the Times of London interviewed a Cambridge neuropsychologist for comment.
Matt Davis, a senior research scientist at Cambridge University's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, spent some time tracking down the origin of this letter-transposition story.
He found that it comes from a letter written in 1999 by Graham Rawlinson, a specialist in child development and educational psychology, to New Scientist magazine in response to an article written about the effects of reversing short chucks of speech.
In his letter, Rawlinson — whom FoxNews.com could not track down — wrote that the article "reminds me of my Ph.D. at Nottingham University, which showed that randomizing letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text."
Rawlinson later contacted Davis, who has put up a Web site to address the issues behind the often forwarded e-mail, to explain his comment and thesis research.
"Clearly, the first and last letters are not the only thing that you use when reading text," he wrote. "If this were the case, how would you tell the difference between pairs of words like 'salt' and 'slat'."
Also to be noted, as one commenter on Davis's Web site, Clive Tooth, posted, is that one permutation can result in many different words, and, while you can take into consideration the sentence's context, one still can't be sure about the author's true intention of word choice.
For example, the transposed letters of 'ponits' could spell out any of five different words – 'pitons', 'points', 'pintos', 'potins', and 'pinots.'


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