So, zou maz notice that something about this looks a little bit different. When I first got to Germanz, I bought a cheap kezboard because I find it reallz uncomfortable to use mz laptop’s kezboard. Being in Germanz, I naturallz bought one with a German lazout. Although the German kezboard shares manz commonalities with the American lazout, it definitelz has its differences, one of which is that the z and y kezs are swapped in position. To avoid annozing us all too badlz, Iäm (ä is also where ‘ is on an American kezboard) going to go ahead and switch back into the American lazout. Just an editorial note for those not in the know: the layout of a keyboard can be changed in Windows to match that of whatever language you want. The letters on the face of the keys are obviously not different, but what comes out when you hit the key is changed according to what language you have selected.
I learned most of the differences between the two pretty easily, since my brain interpreted so many of them as “new”, meaning I didn’t have to first unlearn and then relearn things, just acquire new things. What has driven me to madness though, is this whole y and z thing. When trying to type in English with a German keyboard, I constantly had to go back and replace the z with a y in pretty much every case. For example, I want to type the sentence “Hey what are you doing?” In the German layout, it comes out like this, “Hez what are zou doingÄ”.
Eventually I learned how to deal with this. My typing was slower, but I very seldom made mistakes with the 2 letters. When I wanted to type out a text in German, I now had to UN-relearn what I just taught myself. That is where the problems really began to set in. When I wanted to type a ‘z’, my first instinct was to use my right pointer finger to hit the American ‘y’ key. However, because I had gotten myself used to pausing, thinking a second, and then doing the opposite of what I was used to, I instead hit the American ‘z’ key, thus producing a completely unexpected and very unwanted ‘y’. Example: “Hey, hast du morgen Zeit?” is what I want to type. What comes out, however, is this mess: “Hez, hast du morgen YeitÄ”.
As this whole issue went on, however, it did nothing but continue to deteriorate. It got to the point where I had basically unlearned the location of the 2 keys. On my brain’s version of the keyboard, there were 24 letters and 2 empty spaces, y and z, and those 2 were, in an amazingly Schrödinger-esque sense, on both keys at once. In my entire career as a typist, I’ve learned the rules: one key makes one character, another key makes a different character, there are no duplicates, and there are no changing keys (except through the use of alt, control, etc.). But then one of my basic rules of life was changed. Sometimes a key does produce a different character, and although this is theoretically done in a predictable manner, the human brain is horribly equipped to always remember this.
And so every single time I wrote either of those letters, I had to pause a second, think about which language I was typing in, think about which letter I wanted, and then hit the key. But even after doing this, I still produced the wrong letter about half of the time. After a few weeks of this, I was literally going crazy. You have no idea how often y and z really occur in German and English until you notice how often you have to pause to fix your damn mistakes.
To this day I still do not have this issue sorted out completely. I have since gotten an American keyboard, and even when typing in the American layout, once in a while a ‘z’ will pop up in place of a ‘y’ completely at random. I have permanently altered my brain by learning to use a German keyboard. Crazy.
So just what the heck is happening here? Basically my conjecture is that we never learn the layout of the keyboard. The only thing we know is the muscle movement for a letter. When I learned to type, I looked at my fingers, found a key, and then pressed it; I learned the motion, but as I improved, I completely forgot what letter was actually printed on the key I just hit. Think about it: look at a blank wall and try to picture all 26 letters on the keyboard. Most likely the only ones you’ll get will be the home keys (ASDF, JKL; ) and maybe also QWERTY, since that is the term used to describe this type of keyboard. Now hold your hands up in front of you and start “typing” a sentence. You have no clue where the keys are, but you can still type out an imaginary sentence with ease.
So, moving on. There is another thing that complicates this even further. We don’t type individual letters, we type words. Anyone who has ever entered a CD authenticity verification key has experienced this; typing random strings of characters that don’t form a word is very challenging. Try this exercise: hold your hands out in front of you and imagine you are typing on an imaginary keyboard (visualize the keyboard out in front of you). With some concentration, you can type individual letters. But now type out a word. FAR easier! Every time we type out a word, we are using not just a series of single keystrokes, but a general motion to type a word. After picking the next word out, the brain doesn’t simply start naming off individual letters to be typed; rather it says, “Hands, go type the word “word”. And they do it.
Let’s go with this a little further. When typing out ‘word’, I have an idea of what my hands should do. The one finger does a motion up to the left (w), then to the top right of the keyboard (o), then top left and somewhat in the center (r), but then something freaky happened to me. I hesitated before hitting the ‘d’ key. So I looked down at my keyboard to see what was up, and I noticed that not only was my left middle finger raised up to hit the ‘d’ key, but my right middle finger was also raised, ready to type ‘k’, the final letter of the word the right hand is used to typing, ‘work’. The same thing happened a paragraph ago when I wanted to type ‘complicates.’ I typed out ‘comp,’ paused a tiny moment (my brain had to decide what should come after the ‘comp’ unit, (complete, complicated, computer, etc.) then continued on without even a second thought, finished it to form ‘complicated,’ a word which I probably use much more often. My brain had already decided to type ‘complicated’ clear back at ‘comp.’
So what is all this then? Well, basically I’d argue that the brain thinks in much larger units than we are consciously aware of. In typing the word ‘complicated’, my right hand is already moving to type the ‘o’ before I’ve even hit the ‘c’ key, and ultimately has prepared the entire unit of information to type before even starting the unit. In that sense, I’d say that my brain has a certain set of deeply ingrained units with which I type; not letters or syllables, but sort of a short-list of word roots that I often use. My previous example taught me that one of these units is ‘wor,’ and these units aren’t typed as individual letters, but are a single, fluid motion to produce a word.
Ahh, how I love using really mundane examples to get all psychoanalytical. Science: It works, bitches!
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