The Cambridge University Effect and its Scrambled History

Around 2003 the following meme made its appearance on the Internet.  The idea was NOT to puzzle the words out like a newspaper jumble, but to relax your mind and actually read them:

In The Oxford Handbook of Reading (pg 89) Ram Frost has a note on the above meme: 

 This text does not refer to any true research project
that was conducted at the University of Cambridge,
and probably the author who drafted the preceding
paragraph chose the name “Cambridge University”
at random. Since its first appearance in 2003, the
original English text has been translated into dozens
of languages, demonstrating how reading is
universally resilient to jumbled letters. The name
“Cambridge” stuck, and the phenomenon of being
able to read words with jumbled letters without
much effort is thus often labeled “the Cambridge
University” effect.

Matt Davis of the Cambridge University MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit published a page that attempts to trace the origin of this research...

 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit on the Cambridge University Effect 

Matt Davis believes that the original demonstration of the effect of letter randomisation was provided by Graham Rawlinson who in turn responded by providing a summary of his PhD thesis on this subject...

The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition 

Graham Rawlinson also speculated that the above meme may have resulted from someone reading his 1999 letter to New Scientist magazine:

Reibadailty - From Graham Rawlinson 

Wikipedia notes that a neologism has appeared in regard to this meme: 

Wiki Article on Typoglycemia 

Judy Mandell noted in The Observer in an article on "Chunking" that "Typoglycemia" is starting to develop an interested following in the research community:

Chunking: The Brain’s Shortcut to 

Understanding and Recalling Information

Steve Sachs of the Duke Law School provides an online text jumbler. You can use it to jumble any text that you cut and paste into it:

 The Jumbler by Steve Sachs

Here is what it comes up with for the opening of a famous novel:

It was the bset of tmeis, it was the wrost of temis, it was the age of wsiodm, it was the age of fsohelsonis, it was the epcoh of bieelf, it was the eocph of icrledtuiny, it was the sasoen of Lgiht, it was the saeosn of Deankrss, it was the sprnig of hpoe, it was the weintr of daspeir, we had ehertvinyg borefe us, we had nohintg bforee us, we wree all gniog dircet to Heaevn, we wree all giong dierct the otehr way -- in sorht, the poierd was so far lkie the psrneet piroed, taht smoe of its nesoiist ahiuioterts iienstsd on its bneig rvieeecd, for good or for eivl, in the srauelptvie dergee of csiomrpaon olny.

 A helpful video by Matt on the Conjecture Channel that summarizes the history of the Cambridge History Effect:

Annother educational and entertaining video on typoglycemia and the psychology of reading by Vanessa Hill on the BrainCraft Channel: