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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

I can believe it. I firmly believe the brain acts very differently between typing and handwriting.

I make stupid mistakes all the time when I type. Not misspelling, but those easy there/their/theyre type mistakes. I think it's because I'm just mindlessly trying to express my opinion as fast as possible.

I don't write nearly as much as I type, but I've never made such a mistake when writing. Somewhere between the slower pace, or not being distracted by 100 things going on a screen, makes things feel more deliberate and carefully chosen.

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I think there’s a certain “muscle memory” involved. When you’re writing a word by hand you have to think about each letter, however briefly, as you write it: “w-o-r-d”. But when you’re typing a word you don’t think about each letter so much as you think about the pattern your fingers need to make, if that makes sense?

It’s like when someone asks what the keyboard shortcut is to take a screenshot. Uh, I don’t know? I use it all the time and I couldn’t tell you if I’m hitting control or command or option because the underlying inputs don’t really matter. I only need to know the pattern my fingers are supposed to make and so that’s all that gets committed to memory.

That's a neat observation.

Each handwritten letter requires distinct motor skills (manipulating pen angles, pressure etc.), whereas each keyboard-typed letter requires a much smaller set of nearly identical motor skills (just a "tap").

It goes beyond that, I think. As you're planning what to write, you come up with shorthand because it's hard to keep up with a speaker by hand. Summarizing requires much more active listening, analysis, and synthesis. There's a lot more going on in your brain than when typing.

Excellent insight. Thank you.

Since listening to a Lex Fridman podcast on how one hemisphere of the brain is more devoted to language than the other, I've been thinking about just how complex language is. I've never agreed with some linguists like Chomsky that speak about language as necessary for thought, mostly because my own mental language is far more physical and symbolic than linguistic. At one point in my life, for example, I was able to look at construction drawings and point to the weakest part of a structural system. That's not my brain using language. That's something else.

That said, something that just occurred to me after reading your comment is this: Over time we're having to translate this communication thing into different arenas. My fingers have memorized how to type most words. I wouldn't be able to type as fast as I do if they didn't. My eyes and brain have obviously memorized words at a glance. My ears have memorized words in person, which sound different than they do from a computer or television. They've also memorized the sound of words from 0.5x speed to 3x speed because of all the podcasts I listen to.

I guess where I'm going with this is that we're putting larger and larger demands on our brains. The, oh what to call it, increasing dimensionality of communication? That, whatever that is, it feels so mentally taxing and I can't imagine that is ever going away. If anything it will continue to increase as societies and technologies get more complex.

In college I used to handwrite out all my notes and prepare cheat sheets for tests but I would never refer back to them. Just the action of writing them out helped me to remember things much better than my normally lousy memory.

Wow. Yeah, I never made this connection before.

I type you instead of your frequently, mix up homophones like your/you're and there/their/they're etc. reasonably frequently. I very rarely make these mistakes in hand writing OR on my iPhone; only at the keyboard.

Interesting. I definitely noticed the same issue with my English.

My mother tongue Croatian had a reconstruction of the alphabet in the 19th century and these kinds of issues never appear. The orthography is phonemic almost. So the word you think matches to each tap when thinking of how it sounds.

I wonder if this has to do with how fast typing is. Is there similarly diminished learning in very slow typers? Does a shorthand expert fail to learn as much?

fun thing, it's other way around for me. I hate writing, because I skip letters all the time, have to cross a letter or two to correct that mistake, and make a mess as a result. Not much practice for more than a decade, of course. I have no such problem when typing.

Oddly enough.... I have both problems, making neither medium completely ideal.

Additionally (and mainly?) a skill learnt as a young child - eg. handwriting - is presumably more likely to be fully absorbed and "foolproof" than one like typing which at least in former generations (so may not apply in your case) was learnt later (and often to a lesser competence) as a teenager or adult.

I made tons of mistakes when writing. It's the reason there's an eraser on the back of the pencil and lots of larger erasers as well as things like white-out

Less fluency with handwriting is a possible explanation. If you did it a lot more, you might run into muscle memory mistakes.

This is an original thought to me.

I wonder how grammar evolves now that most language is typed rather than handwritten.

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