Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #56. Stop Memory-Buffer Overrun

The length of a sentence isn't what makes it hard to understand; it's how long you have to wait for a phrase to be completed.

When you're reading a sentence, you don't understand it word by word, but rather phrase by phrase. Phrases are groups of words that can be bundled together, and they're related by the rules of grammar. A noun phrase will include nouns and adjectives, and a verb phrase will include a verb and a noun, for example. These phrases are the building blocks of language, and we naturally chunk sentences into phrase blocks just as we chunk visual images into objects.

This means that we don't treat every word individually as we hear it; we treat words as parts of phrases and have a buffer (a very short-term memory) that stores the words as they come in, until they can be allocated to a phrase. Sentences become cumbersome not if they're long, but if they overrun the buffer required to parse them, and that depends on how long the individual phrases are.

In Action

Read the following sentence to yourself:

• While Bob ate an apple was in the basket.

Did you have to read it a couple of times to get the meaning? It's grammatically correct, but the comma has been left out to emphasize the problem with the sentence.

As you read about Bob, you add the words to an internal buffer to make up a phrase. On first reading, it looks as if the whole first half of the sentence is going to be your first self-contained phrase (in the case of the first, that's ...