Human brains can process some sentences within blink of an eye

Whether it is headlines or WhatsApp messages, humans are inundated with short pieces of text. Now researchers say they have unpicked how we get their gist in one glance.

- Nicola Davis

Prof Liina Pylkkänen, the co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assumed words were understood one by one, in sequence, before being combined to yield the meaning of the sentence.

"From this perspective, at-a-glance language processing really shouldn't work since there's just not enough time for all the sequential processing of words and their combination into a larger representation," she said.

However, the study reveals we can detect certain sentence structures in just 125 milliseconds (ms) - a timeframe similar to the blink of an eye.