Girl Can Say Any Word or Phrase Backwards Immediately


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Say a word or a short phrase to Alyssa. She'll promptly say it backwards. How does she do it? There's no preparation or complex thinking involved. She just reverses the words like she's a machine designed for that purpose. Which is probably what's actually happening.

There. Mystery solved.

-via Dave Barry

What I find interesting about this is that she is not, in fact, "saying words backwards". "Saying words backwards" would mean repeating the actual morphemes reversed, and in reverse order, like what you'd get if you played a record backward.

What this girl is doing is translating the word into its written representation, reversing that representation and then repeating back a pronunciation (following English pronunciation rules) of those reversed letters.

These are different operations that would recruit different parts of the brain, and I actually think what she's doing, and what it suggests about the underlying mechanisms, is much more interesting than just "saying words backwards"... though that would be pretty cool too.
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I used to think my wife's skill of being able to write a mirror image of any word without preparation or pause was amazing...but this is nuts. Yeah, pretty useless unless trying to interpret hidden messages in old heavy metal songs. Otherwise, good for her on getting her 15 minutes in an interesting way!
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