I Can Talk Backwards

Do with that information what you wish

A while ago, I wrote an article about talking backward. But this was when my blog was much smaller—a close-knit community of people who bizarrely wanted to read 60 articles about utilitarianism. Now it’s a less close-knit and larger community of people who want to read me complain about things, and are willing to tolerate me writing boring articles about anthropics. I didn’t really have much to say in the article, beyond that it’s just sort of a fun thing, so that article was mostly me just describing the ability and making dumb jokes (very funny dumb jokes, mind you—and especially funny on account of being in footnotes, as readers of the Bartimaeus Trilogy will know).

But anyway, as I said, I can talk backwards. So if, for example, someone gives me the sentence “a huge number of immigrants are crossing the border every year,” I could instantly say that backward as “a eguh rebmun fo stnargimmi era gnissorc eht redrob yreve raey.” Or, if someone says SSA, I’m liable to say “ass,” quite loudly and energetically (get it, because SSA is a bad view of anthropics). Notably, I don’t flip around the orders of words or pronounce the sounds backward—I instead can pronounce words as they’d be pronounced if they were spelled backward (at one point at camp, rather embarrassingly someone asked me to say racecar backward, so I pronounced it rac-ecar, to much amusement).

The longest word I’ve ever flipped in my head is antidisestablishmentarianism (msinairatnemhsilbatsesiditna, for those wondering), but that was pretty tricky. Longer words are more difficult; I can do almost any word that has fewer than 8-letters almost instantly, while longer ones are harder—it starts to get really tricky around 12 leters. I can also quite fluently do entire sentences.

I’m not the only one with this totally useless skill. There are various others who can also speak backward. Wikipedia tells me that some bloke named Nelson Cowan thinks that having an extraordinary working memory is behind this skill. I like this theory, but have one of my own, according to which being able to speak backward is caused by being extraordinarily handsome, witty, and humble.

The oddest thing about talking backward is the experience of it. It’s very difficult to describe how I do it or even to form a vivid mental picture of how I do it. When I see a word, I just sort of know what it is spelled backward. Contrary to what one might expect, I don’t physically picture flipping the letters of a word in my head. Instead, I just know what the word is backward, a bit like how people typically know how words are spelled.

Yet this is a bit weird. Why is it that some people—myself included—can talk backward? One wouldn’t expect evolution to select for it directly. Yet it also is not through memorizing words—I was able to talk backward from a pretty early age and have never tried memorizing how words are spelled backward. So it’s innate, rare, and yet not selected for—that’s a bit odd.

Now, you might think, as many have suggested, that this would be a good trick at parties. After all, it’s pretty cool, the type of thing that people would find spectacularly impressive when spectacularly inebriated. But, contrary to what one might expect from the general party animal vibe of this blog, I’m not a big partygoer. And even when one is at a party, there are rarely appropriate contexts for one to start flipping around words. Bringing it up out of the blue is just showing off (unless done on one’s private blog, of course).

To some of you, this may come as no surprise. Perhaps you read the old article. Or perhaps you find it quite unsurprising that a utilitarian moral realist with a solid credence in theism is an expert at backward thinking (though contrary to that interpretation of events, perhaps it suggests superior ability to intuit various facts which means people should defer to me more!! Many people are saying this!).

Yawyna, yllufepoh uoy deyojne gnitteg emos noitamrofni tuoba eht suoiretsym nam (ro godllub) dniheb eht kcatsbus.