Thursday, February 02, 2012

My sister's so cool!

A few days ago my brother posted this video on my sister's Facebook wall with the comment, "You're probably even more epic." It's a pretty impressive video, but I can attest that Bryn can do the exact same thing. Our family has tested her speaking-backwards ability many times, and Ty and I have taken a few videos (none of which I can find at the moment). She's pretty good. And she taught me the three best backwards-words: lightpost-tsopthgil, Tim Hortons-Snortroh Mit, and Orchard Park-Krap Drahcro (the name of the mall in our town). Sadly, those are the only three backwards words I can remember, other than Nosila, the backwards version of my first name (which, oddly enough, was once a bonus spelling word in my grade seven class - and yes, I did manage to spell it right).

In the ensuing discussion below the video on Facebook, one friend posted this Today Health article, giving more information about the girl featured in the video who can speak backwards and also telling about some other people who have the ability also. The following paragraphs really impressed me:
[Andrew] Levine, a research professor in philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park, can speak entire sentences backward, in the four languages he knows (that's English, French, German and Italian, if you're interested) and in languages he's unfamiliar with.
"If this girl is doing it the same way I'm doing it, it's nothing. It's like you're speaking another language," Levine says. "In fact, I think that I am effectively bilingual, in the sense that if you were genuinely bilingual, nothing would be going on in your brain." In other words, Levine doesn't consciously think, "TODAY: Y-A-D-O-T." He's just come to innately understand that TODAY backwards is YADOT, sort of like a person bilingual in Spanish and English knows that the words "today" and "hoy" are different ways of saying the same thing.
Wow, that's crazy to me! I just love how cool and interesting and diverse brains are! Here's to all the neat people of this word, and especially to those who can speak backwards. Love your awesomeness, Bryn!

1 comment:

  1. yay!!
    now we need to have a video about numbers that are colours.

    ReplyDelete