Order of letters not important?

I’m sure most of you have seen this e-mail at some point. I can’t remember the first time I saw it but I remember the two last times because both happened at work, one quite recently.

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.

I don’t know what possesses people to just blindly forward things like that on to every one they know without doing a tiny amount of research. It takes only a quick Google search to find Matt Davis’ page at the University of Cambridge, which analyzes each sentence of the meme to explain why that particular paragraph is easy to read and why it isn’t as simple as the meme itself would have you believe. He also shows examples of the meme in other languages.