Disrupting your autopilot

posted by Breadmower on Sat 3rd Feb, 07 at 13:09:15

Isn't it strange how your body can get so used to performing a task, that when you try to do it in a different way, your body almost fights against you? Like when you start driving a new car, and reverse is in a different place on the gearstick - at first, when you try to put it into reverse, your body automatically tries to move the gearstick to the old (wrong) place. Then, without you even noticing it, your body adjusts, and you stop thinking about it.

I find that I have a similar problem with typing. At some point over the last few years, I learnt to touch-type without really noticing. That's cool - I can deal with that, it's useful. I've now started to notice that my hands have begun to a kind of predictive text thing, where I'll try to type a word (like "text"), but as soon as I get as far as typing "te", the predictive text takes over and writes the word "test". Presumably I write "test" a lot (I'm guessing it's probably something to do with testing things like this). It's a bit crazy - even though I'm thinking of the correct word, and my head-voice is saying the correct word, my hands just type what they think I'm going to write. In fact, it's just happened in that sentence - every time I tried to type the word "word", I ended up typing "work" instead.

Anyway, I expect you're wondering where I'm going with this, and if I'm going to make some kind of profound statement. Well, to tell you the truth, I'm only writing stuff to get used to the new keyboard that I've just bought. It's a litte more ergonomic than my previous ergonomic keyboard, so I keep hitting the wrong keys, as my autopilot hasn't had chance to adjust yet. That's it. Nothing profound. Sorry if I've disappointed you ;-)