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Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I first learned to touch-type as a child, and for many years after, I would sometimes 'type' things out on my legs, tabletops, notebooks. At first it was to practice, but after I had mastered typing I kept doing it just because it was still novel to be able to type and feel like I knew how to use technology. Doing that made me realize that typing a character is a very specific and atomic action (compared to writing by hand), as well as an automatic one (once you learn how to touch-type). I wonder if the performance of this solution could be improved by training it to detect the mental impulses that occur when a trained typist imagines typing a character, rather than when the person imagines writing out a character.

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Heck, touch-typing is so ingrained in my brain that I sometimes recall how to type a word to remember how to spell it. For longer words I don't write by hand very often, it's simply easier for me to remember and transliterate the muscle memory.

I can type far more words than i can spell

It’s weird we call it muscle memory. It’s still a brain memory.

Neuroscientists think that motor action is primary, and all sensory processing is in the service of motor action. [1]

Motor movements are some of deepest knowledge we have.

[1] https://youtu.be/I0JuMyGclr0?t=1257

I like watching Prank shows. For some reason its entertaining to see what the body does instantly/unconsciously in response to stimuli when there is no time for thought. Below some threshold its like people have no control over what their legs, hands, face, vocal chords will do...

Another good example of this is that musicians will often deliberately work to get parts of pieces fully in muscle. For fast sequences, if your brain has to get involved, you've already missed a few notes.

Just to note again, the brain is always involved in playing instruments.

> Motor movements are some of deepest knowledge we have.

Don't know if it's is a real thing, but in some CSI type show years ago there was a witness with amnesia (couldn't remember their name etc.) whose identity they found out by engaging him into a conversation to distract the consciousness from the "I can't remember" thoughts and then put a form in front of him he was supposed to sign (IIRC it could have been a witness statement) and the movement of signing something was so ingrained that it persisted even through the amnesia.

Anyone know if this is a real thing or just fiction?

I can't comment on the specific example of signing a form, but I did read about a case like this in Robert Sapolsky's "Why zebra's don't get ulcers".

It's a famous case in neurology, a man called "H.M."

Here's what's written in the chapter "Stress and memory" about H.M.:

    "H.M." had a severe form of epilepsy that was entered in his hippocampus and was resistant to drug treatments available at that time. In a desperate move, a famous neurosurgeon removed a large part of H.M.'s hippocampus, along with much of the surrounding tissue. The seizures mostly abated, and in the aftermath, H.M. was left with a virtually complete inability to turn new short-term memories into long-term ones -- mentally utterly frozen in time.

    Zillions of studies of H.M. have been carried out since, and it has slowly become apparent that despite this profound amnesia, H.M. can still learn how to do some things. Give him some mechanical puzzle to master day after day, and he learns to put it together at the same speed as anyone else, while steadfastly denying each time that he has ever seen it before. Hippocampus and explicit memory are shot; the rest of the brain is intact, as is his ability to acquire a procedural memory.

If you ask me, the CSI episode is definitely plausible if you consider that H.M. was real

It is real, not fiction. Oliver Sacks' "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" contains a similar case, read "In the moment, music and amnesia". In one of the Sack's talks on youtube, I heard his hypothesis to account for this phenomenon: not every learning is equal; some learnings are so ingrained, they and these learnings are stored in the lower brain, brainstem area.

> Heck, touch-typing is so ingrained in my brain that I sometimes recall how to type a word to remember how to spell it.

I've often completely forgotten passwords and had to rely on this muscle memory to regain access.

I once had to leave a meeting to find a keyboard to be able to relay a password to someone over the phone by looking at what I was typing.

I once was so high on MDMA that I could barely speak let alone type something because I just could not understand anything. Not only could I not remember my password, I could not keep my eyes steady enough to see the letters on the keyboard.

I had to unlock my laptop to play some music so I just tried to relax and let my fingers do the thing. I did it.

It's the same with guitar playing. I have to do the motions with left hand to remember the notes and chords :)

I still do that (tap things out in qwerty when not at a keyboard) constantly. I type well over 100wpm, and qwerty is very, very deep in my brain. On occasions I am significantly intoxicated (pretty rare for me) I can still type accurately at >50wpm even if my words are slurred.

There have been times I wanted to switch layouts but qwerty is just too far in there for too many decades.

I've been practicing touch typing for over 5 years now. I seem to be capped at around ~65 WPM. I sometimes wonder if it will stay there, or will it improve.

I take this to test my speed: https://10fastfingers.com/advanced-typing-test/english

Now I've tried to take the test again after roughly a year, out of curiosity, and I got around 75 several times. Maybe it will improve very slowly past this level?

Do you perhaps remember how the improvement trend was with you?

I have been over 100wpm (on qwerty) since a teenager, and I'm in my late 30s now, so unfortunately no. (My scores are routinely 115-125 these days.)

This makes me suspect it might be like instrument playing. A lot easier to learn while young. I'm 29 right now and I've started practicing around 23-24. A bit too late for this kind of muscle memory I guess.

Thank you for sharing, was useful to compare!

Plato said the prime of life doesn't even start until you're 25 and Schopenhauer said something similar (can't recall his exact number). You can still learn and grow a lot way later into life than most people think. If you really care, just try different techniques, measure/test yourself, and continue the cycle. If you can't find the motivation, maybe it's just actually not that important to you, and deep down you have greater interest in other things than learning how to type fast.

You get better over time if you intentionally practice improvement. If you don't, 60-70wpm is a common threshold.

My gut feeling is that this is simply the speed range where the benefits of faster typing during composing quickly fall off. If you're thinking about what to say, you'll write a burst, think, write, think, change a bit, write some more- the limiting factor isn't really WPM.

Transcribing, of course, is another matter, but that is a specialized case.

Do you play an instrument? I have a feeling that I can type quickly (well over 100wpm) because I play the piano as well.

I play guitar, and I am certain that practicing the fine-motor sync skill of using both hands at once has helped my typing, and vice-versa.

For reference, my typing while transcribing rate is in the 100-110 range. My daily-use composition is likely half, simply because I spend most of my time composing in my head.

I will say that the big advantage comes from being completely comfortable touch-typing, without needing to look at the keyboard. Once you've achieved that, the mental load of typing fades in to the background, and you can spend more time considering content instead of the mechanics of creating it.

Yes, you might be on something here. Tried to reflect back on it after reading your comment, and I think I "feel" content with my current writing speed.

Will try to feel less satisfied with my writing speed, and see if it will help. Thank you for taking time to share!

Online chatting, too. My typing speed increased dramatically when I started having conversations online.

> You get better over time if you intentionally practice improvement.

Are there more effective techniques than just typing? I mean like measured techniques for identifying and improving problematic aspects of typing rather than just going at it repeatedly in the hopes that I'll improve overall?

Yes. Feedback from a professional typist, who watches and corrects your form as you type. When I was younger, my father had a secretary who helped me practice on an IBM Selectric, and it helped a tremendous amount compared to the time investment.

I played Everquest and would be running from monsters while typing as a young teenager. So I’d have to type as fast as possible. I touch type around 120 wpm without ever being formally trained.

Maybe try something that forces you to type quickly like the game The Typing of the Dead or The Typing of the Dead 2? They’re silly games but might help since they add urgency to the typing.

It’s also possible that your keyboard is slowing you down somewhat. I started using a super crappy keyboard a while ago with wobbly keycaps, poor actuation pressure, and excess key travel, and my typing speed & accuracy both dropped by over 5% just because the keyboard didn’t work well. It probably won’t take you from 75 to 100+, but if you are looking for something that might give you a modest improvement, you might look at the keyboard you’re using and see if you can find one that works better with your hands.

I don't have a good timeline for going from qwerty to dvorak to tell you (first change), but earlier this year I went from dvorak to workman and was back up to 100wpm at least after about two months. I was in the 140s with dvorak after a year and a half or so. My best with qwerty was 160. I recently hit 115 with workman. It doesn't cause the same right hand strain dvorak did, so I'll likely stick with it longer and hopefully hit my old speeds.

If you do change layouts, research them a bit first. I liked dvorak, but it used the right hand more than the left by a fair bit, like the opposite of qwerty. My right hand didn't deal with the strain as well as my left hand did in qwerty. Workman is about 50/50 left and right hand usage, and also avoids putting common letters in the middle two columns, which reduces how often stretching is needed.

Colemak seems a bit better than Dvorak on paper, but still has some flaws that lead to creation of a "mod DH" variant that moves D and H to a less straining spot since they're common letters.

Workman solves the same issue and is a lot more efficient than even Colemak, plus the 50/50 hand balance seems entirely unique to Workman. That balance was why I chose it over the Carpalx QGMLWB layout or the AI-generated Halmak layout, which are even more efficient in some cases than Workman. I have a friend who uses QGMLWB, but as far as I know, he doesn't get any pain in his hands. He also doesn't type quite as fast as I have, which may be related.

Lastly, I want to mention that I built an ergonomic keyboard and used it with dvorak for a couple months without my hand pain going away, which is why I bothered changing layouts again. The journey has been educational. I never used to care about stuff like the pinky being weak and overused. Now I have stuff like backspace and enter on thumb keys, I'm thinking about how much I have to stretch to certain keys, etc.

Some of these ergo keyboards take some keys off the right side compared to something like a 60%, but then you realize your right pinky was covering a huge amount of keys, and maybe it's worth having an extra inner column where you move the = sign to. I use a Pinky4 after using a Pok3r in the past, and it seemed annoying at first that the top row didn't fit the - and = right of the 0, but I prefer it now that I'm used to it. I've tweaked the key layout several times in QMK and it's been a lot of fun. So, I'd recommend both changing layouts and replacing your keyboard if you have any interest in this stuff.

You may be interested in the recently published https://engram.dev layout :)

Have you ever tried to label a blank keyboard from memory? Even though you know where all of the letters are and use them all the time without thinking it’s almost impossible.

I’ve found it’s quite doable if you just “type” out different words on a blank keyboard and then use where your fingers land as the label. If you type “animal” you then know the position of all the constituent letters. So all you need to do is type a sentence with all characters, like “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Interesting effect though. This reminds me that it’s almost impossible to draw a bicycle from memory. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2016/04/can-you-draw-bicycle-f...

Or even just type out the alphabet. But labeling it from left to right, top to bottom, would indeed be tricky once you got past 'qwerty'.

I'm bilingual. My memory committed phone numbers and such are stored in one language only. To translate them, I need to write the number down and read it in the other language.

You can't visualize the numbers? Or translate the "audio" in your mind?

I can, but it's easier to write it, if I'm at a desk. Audio-translating is harder than it seems that it should be... especially if I"m struggling to recall the number. I suspect that recall and translation are like lead guitar and vocals.

For me numbers are stored in one language or the other, but are always recalled in the same language. For example, my SSN is in English but my garage door opener code is Chinese.

For some reason, I remember numbers like that as though I were typing them on a numpad. I automatically visualize a numpad and remember the sequence of numbers as distinct locations on it. Funnily enough, even phone numbers use this computer numpad rather than the number pad on a phone.

Indeed! It is like entering a pincode on a keypad for the office door every single day. Then the new guy calls and asks you about the pin, and you have NO idea. This happened to me and I had to put my hand on something flat and see myself typing.

I suspect this is some part due to the arrangement of the numbers. Numbers on keypads in these kind of devices often has "1 2 3" on the top row. Whereas on the keybaords and calculators it is reverse. The top row there goes "7 8 9".

In the early days of card payment terminals my mum couldn't remember her PIN number to pay at a shop. Had to run over to an ATM and do a pretend transaction and take note of what she entered.

I'm like that with my phone lock pin. I use it visuospacially rather than numerically.

I totally can do that with the Russian layout. Probably can with Latin too, but I won't be so sure.

I had to re-key my keyboard recently and managed to get all keys right, EXCEPT for a swapped right alt/ctrl. I don’t think I ever typed on those two, so maybe it’s a blank in my muscle memory map :)

I realised a short while ago, that no matter which keyboard I'm sitting in front of, I simply do not use the right alt-gr, windows, menu, control or shift keys. They could just not be there and I wouldn't notice.

I also never use the numeric keypad, but I think that's more to do with being left handed.

I can do it no problem (have changed all the keycaps on a keyboard a few times), but it is indeed a different kind of memorization. I can recite the qwerty letters all in a row, but for dvorak and workman, I didn't spend as many years with them (or actually ever see keycaps arranged that way on a real keyboard), so I would have to imagine myself typing for those.

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