Can you get dyslexia in your fingers?
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I’ve never been a great typist. I’m fast but inaccurate. Recently though a weird kind of disconnect between my brain and my fingers has been making my typing life a misery.
I learned to type back in the early 80s as child banging out code on a Sinclair ZX81. After 25 years of practice I ought to be getting better at it. But no. One of my former colleagues told me how much it used to drive her round the bend listening to me clattering away at the keyboard only for it to be followed by repeated pounding on the backspace key as I try to undo all the mistakes I’ve made. Another friend commented on how quickly I could type especially considering I spent half my time deleting.
In the past year or so I’ve developed an even stranger affliction. It’s not down to inaccurate typing it’s that somewhere between my brain and my fingers the words I’m typing change. In that last sentence for example I thought “somewhere” but typed “something”. This is why I think it’s like dyslexia. The words are getting themselves jumbled up. They’re not mistyped, they’re not in the wrong order, they’re just not the word they should be.
It’s really annoying because when I type the wrong word I type it correctly. Spellcheckers don’t pick up on the mistake because it’s correctly spelled. I’ve always been good at spelling and grammar but recently I’ve been misusing “there”, “their” and “they’re”. It’s not that I don’t know the difference. It’s not that I don’t know which is the correct one to use. It’s that my fingers on the keyboard have their own idea of which word I want to use.
I vaguely remember from my university Psychology course that there’s a phenomenon in learning called “chaining”. Basically, as you learn to do tasks your brain stops needing to think about the next step and just initiates a chain of steps. For example, when you start driving you need to think about stepping off the accelerator, engaging the clutch, moving the gear stick, releasing the clutch, pressing down the accelerator. As you get more experienced you don’t think about each step you just do the “change gear” chain of actions.
My theory is that I’ve learned chains of actions to type certain words semi-automatically and for some reason my brain is picking the wrong chain. Or it could be that I’m just mental. The jury’s out.
Any psychology experts or fellow finger-dyslexia sufferers out there?
December 16th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
What a great question? I have the same problem myself, but never thought of looking at it in that way. For example, I was typing the word Ontario and even though in my head I was saying O N T A R I O, it came out O T O N R I A. That’s just one example of how I move my letters around while I am typing. It would be nice to know why this is happening.
December 28th, 2007 at 4:55 am
I’m a very fast typer and I think sometimes I suffer from the same thing too. It’s crazy and very annoying. Whether my fingers just reverse letters or I write similar words, things don’t come out of my fingers right.