Submitted via IRC for Sulla
Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter "g," Johns Hopkins researchers have found.
Most people don't even know that two forms of the letter -- one usually handwritten, the other typeset -- exist. And if they do, they can't write the typeset one we usually see. They can't even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup.
[...] Unlike most letters, "g" has two lowercase print versions. There's the opentail one that most everyone uses when writing by hand; it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Then there's the looptail g, which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri and, hence, in most printed and typed material.
Source: http://releases.jhu.edu/2018/04/03/jhu-finds-letter-weve-seen-millions-of-times-yet-cant-write/
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Friday April 06 2018, @02:55PM
Yeah just because we can recognize something doesn't mean we can draw it from scratch. Whether it's a typographical character or a human face.
http://www.caltech.edu/news/single-cell-recognition-halle-berry-brain-cell-1013 [caltech.edu]
Perhaps the way it works is as if the sensory and other neurons are "reading out numbers" in a Bingo Hall of the brain and when the right numbers are read the Halle Berry (or "g" letter) neurons yell out "BINGO! Halle Berry!" and most of the rest of the neurons go "OK, I guess that's Halle Berry".
But to actually draw Halle Berry takes a lot more coordination and effort from a lot more neurons and possibly a different set of neurons. After all when I think g while typing vs when I think g while writing, the "concept g" neurons are probably mostly the same but the output neurons are different depending on whether I'm typing or writing. And when I think and type "might" far fewer neurons might be thinking of the letter g but it still gets typed :).