How does a painting read?

[Mike McCarty]

I've never fully bought into the notion that a painting should be oriented left to right because we read a newspaper in that fashion. It seems to me that in that first split second, or gestalt:

"the study of perception and behavior from the standpoint of an individual's response to configurational wholes with stress on the uniformity of psychological and physiological events and rejection of analysis into discrete events of stimulus, percept, and response,"

our brains are capable of falling into any number of methods of deciphering information. Reading words, whether left to right or up and down, requires a syntax or the result would be chaos. However, when we leave our front door our brain understands that the world will not be ordered in any preconceived fashion. It accepts the dynamic nature of the "picture" and is able to analyze further using a more complicated calculus.

Try reading the following text. It's amazing how little syntax the brain actually needs.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.