So how does the the human brain ignore the second the?

Oh, shit

One could say it is
is magic.

Optimization

Damn I completely missed it😂!

Machine learning... but in our case simply learning.

Fooled me even though I knew this one XD

damn.. (o_O)

Manieth time I see this, manieth time I fall for it.

It wants to see what it wants to see

The brain also doesn't read every letter of a word, it skims the words and forms the sentence from memory "cache" rather then raw input based on historical formations of what it has read.

Source: Abraham Lincoln circa 2005

For example, you should be able to read this without issue despite everything wrong with it.

it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Read "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

@C0D4 Indeed I read it fluently. This is brilliant.

It doesn't. It detects duplication and uses it to reinforce the duplicated things.

That is, how the common stupid ad works. It gets shoved in your face so often, that you still uncounciously remember the product next time you see it - regardless of whether you even paid any attention to the ad (but it works better if you had any emotional reaction while seeing or hearing it).

@Oktokolo Depends if you read every single letter and words or just happen to be a slow reader sure.
But for those who read fast or usually skim the text, as @C0D4 put it, the brain will just process some letters and fill the rest. Same thing when you look at the beginning of a word and automatically think or predict what the full word is, not to mention that such people (especially those who know a bit about speed reading) will look at the context words using their peripheral vision.

@C0D4 bag of letters kinda?

@Lensflare Wetware learning. :)

@C0D4 Tnkhas, now I wnat to wirte evreythnig tihs way.

why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

@math-silva ew. Too verbose.

Just as HTML ignores your unclosed tags and nested elements that shouldnt be able to nest elements, and it just renders them without errors

Chunking probably, or adjacent words are probably treated like a set with a series of sliding windows.

What would be cool is to put volunteers through a brain scan of some sort, or EKG, and show them series of statements with or without duplicates. And then look for which brain region is lit up when statements with duplicate words are shown, versus what regions are silent on the no-duplicate cases.