Have you ever seen that email that has gone around about some study done that the human brain reads whole words and doesn't look at letters? It claims that you can scramble words and as long as you leave the first and last letters in place, your brain can read them quickly with no problem.

I found no such studies via a quick Google search, but I did find lots of people saying that there is no such study. If you think about it, it all works well as long as the text you are scrambling doesn't contain too long of words or words that have many anagrams. But alas, it is still interesting that your brain is reasonably good at this.

I thought it would be interesting to be able to quickly scramble other texts so you can see how hard it is to read text that isn't hand picked. Also, I wonder if there is some value in reading in the manner to teach your brain to read words instead of letters. That's basically what speed reading is, except that good speed readers read more than just one word at a time.

Useful or not, here it is. Just create a bookmark with this text as the URL. Then, click the bookmark while on any webpage and it will scramble all of the text on the page.

javascript:(function(){var c={};c.doForNodes=function(a,d,b){typeof b=="undefined"&&(b=document);a(b)&&d(b);if(b.childNodes)for(var e=0;e<b.childNodes.length;e++)c.doForNodes(a,d,b.childNodes[e])};c.isTextNode=function(a){return a.nodeType==(a.TEXT_NODE||3)};c.scrambleWordsInTextNode=function(a){a.data=c.scrambleText(a.data)};c.scrambleText=function(a){for(var a=a.match(/(\w+)|(\W+)/g),d=[],b=0;b<a.length;b++)a[b].match(/\w+/)?d.push(c.scrambleWord(a[b])):d.push(a[b]);return d.join("")};c.scrambleWord=function(a){if(a.length<=2)return a;for(var d=[],b=0;b<a.length;b++)d.push(a.substr(b,1));var a=d.splice(0,1),b=d.splice(d.length-1,1),c=[];for(c.push(a);d.length;)c.push(d.splice(parseInt(Math.random()*d.length),1));c.push(b);return c.join("")};c.scramble=function(){c.doForNodes(c.isTextNode,c.scrambleWordsInTextNode)};c.scramble()})();

Click here to scramble this page now

See the source code for the web scrambler.