I just came across this on the Interwebs, it actually turned out to be an urban ledgend buy it appears to work at least for shorter words, fascinating none the less!
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is
taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Or rather…
According to a researcher (sic) at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.
Wow, but this is not so easy:
A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur
Ok, so it doesn’t work well for longer words but if you’d like to read more thenhere you go Matt Davis’s personal web pages at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, U.K.