Myth-buster: the viral text claims you can easily read words with scrambled letters as long as the first and last stay put. No Cambridge study ever showed this. Cambridge researcher Matt Davis explained that the trick mostly works with short words and carefully chosen scrambles. Experiments confirm that jumbled letters noticeably slow reading.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.