something wrong with my brain?

So my brand new MacBook Pro has some kind of video problem, which is a whole other entry for another day, but the bottom line is I’ve got to take it to Apple and get whatever is wrong repaired before the problem (which is currently merely in the “annoying” category) becomes a functional problem. So I log on to Apple’s website to make an appointment for the nearest Apple Store, take the first available date, and it tells me I should arrive on “Friday, February 28th, 2009, at 2:45pm” – okay, except February 28th isn’t a Friday. Oops. I was in a sarcastic mood, so I even went so far as to post a screen capture of Apple’s goof to Twitter, asking “When should I arrive, Apple, on Friday or on the 28th?” To which someone pointed out that the word “Friday” didn’t appear anywhere in the screen capture I’d posted:

And they were right. And that’s scary.

You see it’s not that it said “Saturday” or any other day of the week. Instead it simply said “February 28th, 2009” and yet somehow when I looked at it I saw “Friday, February 28th, 2009.” And not just in a passing glance either, as once I realized Friday wasn’t the 28th I went back and stared at it for awhile to try to figure out what I was missing. As it turned out, I didn’t just misread what it said, my brain in fact inserted an entire extra word.

The trouble is, this happens at lot lately. I’m familiar with dyslexia, but this ain’t that. What’s happened to me over the past year or two is that while reading I’ll see an entire wrong word. Sometimes it’s seeing the word “Friday” that isn’t even there, but more often it’s along the lines of reading the word “salt” and instead seeing “secretary” or “Spain” – the first letter is typically the same, but the word I think I see doesn’t necessarily even come close to the word that’s really there in terms of being the same length or sharing any additional letters. I often find myself taking longer to read a document or article because each time I read a sentence that seems odd to me, I go back and read it a second and third time to determine whether perhaps the sentence seems odd because my brain substituted a key word changing the sentence’s meaning. I no longer trust that what I’m seeing on the page is the same as what it actually says.

I’ve worn glasses since I was a kid, and the past few years my eye allergies have been bad enough that I’ve had to carry eye drops around with me at all times, but this doesn’t seem like a vision-related problem. I see the text just fine, I don’t have to squint to read, and I don’t need reading glasses. In fact, when I see an incorrect word, it’s not because I can’t see the word clearly; for instance I very clearly saw the word “Friday” in the above image. I wasn’t mis-reading the text on the page, instead my brain was showing me a very clear image of something that just plain didn’t exist.

And yet oddly enough, it doesn’t affect my own writing. It’s not like I’m randomly using the wrong words while typing. It’s strictly limited to what I see when I’m reading. And yet it just doesn’t feel like an eye-related issue. It feels like a brain-related issue.