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LiveScience
LiveScience
Ben Turner

Our brains can understand written sentences in the 'blink of an eye,' study reveals

A woman scrolls through social media messages on her smartphone.

Human brains can discern the basic structures of written language from a single glance — enabling us to quickly consume the torrent of information fed to us by smartphones, a new study finds.

By measuring the brain activity of 36 volunteers, scientists found that people can detect basic sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds, or about the speed of a blink of an eye.

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