What’s happening in our brain when we think to type one word but our fingers type a similar one?

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As someone that does a lot of writing for a living, this is something I come across at least a few times per week. I’ve always wondered why but never thought to look it up.

As an example that just happened, I meant to type the word “confidence”. The rest of the sentence was formed perfectly but in place of “confidence”, I typed “condense”. Wot?

Perhaps even more strange, I never catch these weird mistakes until I’m proof reading my work later. I see the words appearing on the screen as I’m typing them and even though I was intending to type “confidence”, my fingers type “condense”, see that word show up on the screen and my brain goes ‘yep, confidence, that’s right’.

I assume this is a common thing but what gives? Most of my work is done on a PC in Google Docs so while there is spell check, there’s no autocorrect.

Possibly relevant, my typing speed usually tests somewhere around 120wpm. I’m not about to set a world record but I’m also not pecking at the keyboard with two fingers. Since I’m not really focusing on one word at a time and often even thinking about other things while I type, maybe it’s a typing equivalent of accidentally blending two words together when we speak?

In: Biology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

How many Fs do you see in the text below?

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-

SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-

IC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE

EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Anonymous 0 Comments

While typing, your brain isn‘t focused on individual words, but whole sentences. It‘s similar to skimming while reading. Have you seen that image that was everywhere on social media a few years ago, of a sentence where every word had the correct beginning and ending sounds, but the middle of the words are nonsense?

In addition to this, the act of typing takes a lot of subconscious attention. You‘re moving 9-10 digits with muscle memory while converting your thoughts into those movements, typographical errors are very common, which is why typing speed is usually expressed in corrected wpm.

TL:DR, your language center isn’t as good at multitasking as it pretends to be, but disguises this by by assuming that a word that looks like what it is expecting to see is correct without scrutinizing it. Did you notice the extra by in this paragraph?