To Read The Letter: Fill & Download for Free

I did. I laughed at some (“Dear Soldier, Have fun at War!”) and cried at others (“Dear Soldier, Did you know my dad? He died in Iraq last year. I miss him and didn’t get to know him very well.”). I replied to as many as I could (or to their teachers who had them write and send the letters) and answered as many questions as I could.

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists joke that reading is a form of brainwashing, which by far, is good for people, despite making us defenceless against an army of 26 letters in the alphabet.Literate people only need to look at print to know what it says. If I put a word or two in front of your eyes, you'll feel compelled to read it - your brain does it for you automatically before you decide whether to read or not. Try to force yourself not to read the sentence below while looking at it. Investigate the visual look of the words without reading them. Easy, or not?People are much faster at reading, than naming pictures. See how fast you can name all the pictures below without stumbling. You might be relatively fast (an average person would take around 10 seconds to complete the task, compared with 3-5 seconds if the pictures were words), but you wouldn't say naming pictures is entirely automatic, would you?The Stroop paradigm is a nice demonstration of how this problem works (see below). Try to correctly name the colour of the word (irrespectively of what it says) as fast as you can. The difficulty is that, before you name the colour of the ink, you involuntarily read the word, and the meaning comes to mind unbidden. Once you have learned to read, you cannot help but read words.We find this faster reading vs. naming problem astonishing because when we were children, it was the other way round. The learning to read process is irreversible. This is why it is a kind of 'brainwashing' - the choice has been taken away from us.

Let's see, I read the word "Congratulations" and -Went from utter disbelief "They must have made a mistake", to:Euphoria, to:"I bet there is a catch and if I read the rest of the letter I am going to find I am waitlisted", to:Not wanting to read the rest of the letter, to:Reluctantly reading it quickly, to:Reading it again slowly, to:Reading it for a third time, to:Shock "OMG I actually made it" to:Terror "I am going to be the dumbest person in the history of MIT to go there" to:Doing a crazy whoop and war dance when I admitted to myself that I don't care if I am the dumbest person to go there as long as I was surrounded by the jaw dropping brilliance and energy I encountered when I visited campus. This would only bring out the best in me and it did - I stepped up my game and hard work to levels I didn't know I was capable of.This was all in a space of about 90 seconds.I was so sure I wouldn't get in that I almost never applied. What a mistake that would have been!