Why do I read (see) words that are not there?

Question

I do this online, newspaper, or books. And no I am not a dumb+++

Answer 1

Qitue pssiolby bsaucee yuor biran flils in a lot of ifintorman for you (misspelling intentional)

We tend to speed things along by assuming what will be there and slow down to actually read it only when something disturbs the pattern. Although my sentence above may be diffucult to read, it's not as difficult as it really should be. It has been demonstrated that if the first and last letters of words are in the proper position, then the brain is capable of figuring out, fairly readily, what the rest of the word is, no matter how jumbled.

Answer 2

Dude, I'm 28, and I've done that for as long as I can remember. My theory is that if there's a given phrase that I'm familiar with ("To boldly go where no one has gone before"), and I see a similar phrase in an article ("To boldly go into the next room"), my brain is going to associate that phrase with the "classic" phrase stuck in my brain. So when I read that phrase, I'm going to be seeing "where no one has gone before", even though it's not there.
Glad to see I'm not alone on this, because I'm not a dumb*** either.

Answer 3

You read too fast. You're not focusing entirely on what you're reading.