I had an odd realization a few days ago, which is that I don’t know where the keys on the keyboard are. I know how to hit them fast and accurately, but I don’t consciously know where they are. I do know the QWERTY part, as a unit, but even that doesn’t translate to knowing where the E or the T is on its own. I know the how well enough that it’s overridden the where.
I did a little Facebook post about it and other examples of the phenomenon came rolling in – phone numbers, piano keys, the moves we make when driving, figure skating, ballet. I added my library card number – I’ve noticed many times that I can type it but I cannot simply call it to mind and write it down – I know what the final 7 or so digits are but not their order or where they repeat. I have to pretend to type them to get it right. Unconscious processing is so weird and interesting.
Stewart pointed to Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore exploring how it works at the piano.
https://youtu.be/xVwFqGSGBCU
This morning Steve Watson contributed the link to the perfect Awkward Yeti.
Comments
19 responses to “The brain knows but the mind is at a loss”
OB: It brings to mind the centipede effect.
It is a fascinating problem. We can think of a whole lot of ‘other things’ while performing routine tasks, like say walking down the street AND at the same time chewing gum, while thinking of something else, like say, quantum mechanics. Dudley Moore’s piano playing had been ‘routinised’ like that, so that he could transpose the piece out of its usual key AND play it transposed while talking about other things not related to the notes he was about to play.
Life is really a long, long sequence of centipede dilemmas avoided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centipede%27s_Dilemma#The_poem
F and J on qwerty have a little wart to guide your fingertips to the base position. They know that, even if you don’t. :-) Same on the number pad: 5.
!!! So they do! I didn’t know that, but sure enough, there they are.
Ahh. At last my task sheet for today is complete and I may rest my weary head. ;-)
Registration mark.
Rrrr @14, I bet that feels good!
I cannot find a link to it, but a couple of days ago NPR ran a story on a British academic who has some kind of condition wherein he doesn’t get proper feedback from his muscles, so he doesn’t know what position his limbs are in unless he’s looking at them. Apparently he has to think out each movement in order to be able to walk, and must keep his eyes on his legs. He told an anecdote about walking across his campus and an attractive woman catching his eye, which broke his concentration on his legs, causing him to stumble and fall.
Omar thank you for that extract – so apropos.
OB: And let me take this opportunity to thank you for the thread; and this wonderful salon, and its history, and for being in your own way the Gertrude Stein of Cyberspace.
https://bonjourparis.com/history/americans-in-paris-gertrude-stein/
http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/1983/ga830509.gif
(a Stewartesque post)
It’s funny you should say that. Just the other day my niece saw me typing without looking at the screen or the keyboard while talking to her about something we were both watching on the TV. We started talking about how I can do that and…. I found out that I actually do know where all the keys are. I told her I didn’t and she didn’t believe me so I set out to prove her wrong and…. I was the wrong one.
I’ve never tried to learn where the keys are and I didn’t think I had that kind of conscious map of them in my head. But apparently I do.
One day I’ll be in a pub quiz where this comes up and I will be triumphant. Until then it will be just another useless super power.
This exactly… I find I can’t remember passwords unless I’m typing them; it’s truly strange.
Hahaha the Gertrude Stein of Cyberspace.
The keyboard ‘warts,’ the braille-dots on ‘f’ and ‘j,’ have not always been there. There are absent on most typewriters I’ve seen. Perhaps all of them. I don’t know when and where they were introduced, but its a worthy question.
Proprioception/kinesthesia cannot be verbalized effectively. As such, even the most skillful and specific performance is outside of shared, ‘public,’ expression. Part II of Sherrington’s ‘The Endeavour of Jean Fernel’ devotes a whole chapter to the way that abstract concepts like Medieval physiological superstition can be perpetuated in the absence of specific knowledge.
Popper went on to study the Alexander Technique, at least briefly, some time in the 1950s.
I play guitar, mandolin, banjo, piano, drums and I cannot explain to myself how I can remember anything. I know almost no notes or keys. I cannot read music and learn everything by hear (with exception of Bach which I use tablature then just memorize position). Everything is about space and time, nothing about labels.
I cannot describe the keyboard I am writing on either except that I can type over >70 wpm. Crazy
FWIW, some typewriters had “dished” keys on the home row, with slightly deeper indentations. This may have been more common with electric typewriters. The first IBM data terminal keyboards were modeled on these.
Here’s an ad for one in 1981:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ur-nonhaLwEC&pg=RA1-PA3&lpg=RA1-PA3&dq=dished+home+row+keys&source=bl&ots=Nbd-fQT5fd&sig=eBgpNOtoN8x9eiQtLcUvk9ClpjQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiK1qr-xtPaAhUDbq0KHZyKCVwQ6AEIczAM#v=onepage&q=dished%20home%20row%20keys&f=false
As keyboards became flatter, for laptops especially, bumps or bars on the F/J or D/K became common, and on the F/J is effectively standard now, I think.
I recently heard someone on a podcast (can’t remember who or which now) give some very useful advice–if someone is beating you at a game or sport due to their superior skill, compliment them! ‘Wow, you’re such a great tennis player! I wish I could play like that! How do you do it?’ Making them consciously think about how they manage to be so skilled will totally throw them off their game and give you the advantage.
guest @#16:
Must bear that tactic in mind for my next game of croquet.
;-)
Ah, croquet! I am sure the game derives from a sort of kinaesthetic nastiness and doubleness in the English character (I am, by the way, British, though not wholly echt English, as you can tell from my spelling of ‘kinesthetic’ – the first time, not this time). A nastiness that you find particularly in the upper-class English character. A green, beautifully cut lawn and everyone dressed in whites, a lovely summer’s day, Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches to look forward to, and some ***** has just slammed your ball into the shrubbery, and you have to bloody well be polite even as you are seething with murderous rage… I don’t think Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote a novel about croquet, but one feels she should have: the surface smiling calm and the volcanic emotions seething beneath. I remember reading somewhere that after ‘gate-ball’ (the Japanese version of croquet) became popular among old people here in Japan, there were quite a few incidents of elderly people being injured and on one or two occasions killed as mallets were used for hitting things other than balls… It made me really like the Japanese – they were natural, and acted boldly on their emotions…
Ah, “The Body in Question.” I remember seeing bits of this many years ago when my late teen self was not quite old enough to truly appreciate it, though I thought the bits I saw were very good. Seeing this small clip was an eye opener, a presenter so interested and enthusiastic, exloring interesting questions on camera with wit and erudition. No CGI effects, just two blokes around a piano, trying to find out what it’s like to play music without having to actually think about where one puts one’s fingers. Brilliant. I’ll have to see if the whole series is available somewhere. Thanks for this!