Competence and Focus

Over the last couple of decades I’ve been very interested in making anagrams – and not just small ones. My efforts have included songs, poetry and even spam emails.

I’ve also noticed that I make more and more typo’s in which letters are scrambled. While working on a story recently, I thought ‘toad’, but my fingers typed ‘today’.

If these two things are related, it might have interesting implications. Could it be that once the brain begins to learn new skills that involve breaking through old boundaries such as normal spelling, it can also get confused by the new range of options available? In other words, as competence expands beyond usual boundaries, does focus decline?

I have encountered similar phenomena in other contexts. A good example is that I sometimes mistakenly pull a door handle when I see the word ‘PULL’, and only afterwards realise that the word is on the other side of the glass and appears to be written backwards. I remember a time in my childhood when backwards writing was pretty much impossible to read — but eventually I became interested in practising the skill, and now I find it relatively simple. Perhaps this has wired my word recognition neurons up to my ‘backwards reading’ neurons in such a way as to make the forwards/backwards nature of the source image incidental to comprehension.

A slightly more hazardous instance of this problem arises sometimes when I’m driving. If I’m leaving a car park, and “NO ENTRY” is painted on the road in such a way as to be legible to errant incoming drivers, sometimes I read it upside down and hit the brakes before I understand that it isn’t intended for me.

I think we need a name for this phenomenon. I’d like to suggest “Domain Creep”, because the usual domain of a comprehension skill gets expanded when we toy with the edges of it, and eventually it unravels a little.

Just a short one this time – I’m musing… if you have any other examples of domain creep, I’d love to hear about them.