event related potentials and why you should write well…

for those of you who have heard me tangent about spelling and grammar problems, and why all you dicks can’t just speak properly so i can understand, and especially for those of you who think that my ramblings are unwarranted and just the product of an obsessive compulsive mind: here’s a little lesson in why i feel that way and why you’re an idiot:

while you’re thinking(which isn’t often so this kind of data took a really long time to collect) your brain is pushing chemical and electrical signals around all over the place. the movement of electricity produces electromagnetic waves that are very slight but still measurable. these waves are most commonly measured by a process called electroencephalography or EEG. by organizing the data from EEG we can see how much activity occurred in your brain and approximately where it’s at.
there are particular spikes in activity that we like to keep track of and we call those event-related potentials(ERPs). these are spikes in activity that are clearly caused by a stimulus that we as scientists provide to the subject.
there has been lots of research done on language and how we process it because it’s such a unique phenomenon. one of the main ways that we try to figure out how your brain works is to try and break it(figuratively speaking, of course). we do this by producing errors in the way that you would normally think so that you have to stop and reconfigure your processing method.
my favorite way to do this is with what we call garden path sentences. it’s actually a perfectly legitimate sentence but you start out reading it the wrong way because that’s the more common way to read it. an example of this is “the horse ran past the barn fell.” see, when you get to that last word you have to re-read the sentence to figure out what it means.
now, back to the ERPs. there is an event-related potential that is associated with syntactic problems like this. we call it the P600 because it usually occurs about 600 milliseconds after the stimulus(which is to say, the word that confused you). this means that it takes you at least 600 milliseconds extra to process the sentence you just read. and this isn’t the only error that can occur. there are documented ERPs related to linguistic problems that occur anywhere from 100ms to a whole second after the stimuli. now imagine that somebody writes something that’s so ungodly misspelled and poorly constructed that i would have an aneurism. that sentence could take several seconds extra time just to read and understand than normal. for most sentences today, that’s double the reading time.

and this is exactly why bad spelling and grammar irritates me. you wouldn’t be okay with somebody just hanging out after a stoplight turns green, would you? and you wouldn’t be happy with a fast food worker who just stared at you blankly after you gave your order, would you? that’s because they’re wasting your time and that’s insulting and irritating. i feel the same way about language. every time i have to read a shitty sentence like that it wastes precious seconds of my life(just like this blog post). these quickly add up to minutes in a day and many hours over the course of a year. so in effect, your bad spelling and grammar takes up the time that i could have spent hiking, eating, fucking, reading or whatever else i care to do but instead i’m reading your sad excuse for a sentence.

so, i hope you learned something today and will make at least a small effort to be less thoroughly irritating. oh, and as a note to the cunt i used to live with: fuck you! i know science just as well as you and i even deign to show it! cunt.
i leave you with this adorable picture: