Memory in your brain, memory in your hands

With the lack of a clear perspective for the near future that the COVID-19 pandemic is causing, many of us are looking back to try to give the people from our past the attention that our tight BP  (before the pandemic) agenda did not allow. I have not only thought a lot about former school and college mates and teachers, but even got in touch with a few of them, although in some cases the impression was not that positive, because we have all changed and the distance has allowed us to grow even further apart than we already were. But memory can be very selective at times and give the past a rosy tinge that is not true: it is a pure hygienic measure that has evolved in our minds to allow us to get over the unpleasant events of the past or, at least, over some of the suffering that they have produced.

However, our minds are not the only part of our body capable of remembering. With all my recent efforts to recover the custom of handwriting I have been reminded of the fact that my hand remembers perfectly well what my cursive looks like. As we write (particularly once we have a certain fluency) most of the time we do not have to think about the individual letters that we draw: instead our hand translates the words into writing in an almost automatic way. In my case I am positive that the translation is essentially phonetic: I speak the words inside my head and my hands puts them in writing, which is why I occasionally mistake "meet" for "meet", "stake" for "steak" or "they're" for "their". Surprisingly, the phonetic similarity does not prevent me from noticing the error if I read the sentence. In fact, I tend to make the same kind of errors both in typing and handwriting, so the memory mechanisms of both activities must be related. And it also happens that the muscle memory is not infinite.

Photo: theilr

After I got the new mechanical keyboard in summer I spent some weeks doing a short daily typing practice to get used to it and it was a quick process. Then I read about the Workman keyboard layout, which should in principle reduce the strain of the fingers while typing, so I decided to give it a try, but it was hard: my fingers kept remembering the position of the keys in the usual QWERTY layout, so if I typed slowly I did not have much trouble remembering the new position of the keys, but as soon as I tried to speed up a bit my fingers eventually took over and I started to make an inordinate amount of mistakes. Over the course of six weeks I gathered more than 23 hours of typing practice that put me in the 240 cpm (characters per minute) range, which is already rather fast, but not as much as my QWERTY speed, which is regularly above 350 cpm. I do not know if this was the smartest approach, but the fact is that I could not afford to go "cold turkey" on the Workman keyboard only, so for the whole length of the period I kept alternating between both layout without too much trouble. However, there was a day when I realized I was absolutely incapable of finding the keys in the QWERTY keyboard: hard as I tried I had gotten so used to the Workman that I was losing the other, as if one layer of muscle memory was overlaying (and inhibiting) the other. That was a deal breaker for me, because in spite of all the effort that I had put into the experiment I was certainly not ready to give up the classic layout entirely, so I decided to put a sudden stop to the Workman and withing a day or two my typing skills were back to normal.

Another remarkable example of muscle memory is the resolution of Rubik's cube. There are a number of different methods, but all of them are based on decomposing the resolution of the puzzle in a small number of steps and then memorizing a combination of turns (a so-called algorithm) that can address every possible combination in each step. I use the CFOP method (acronym for Cross, First two layers, Orientation of the last layer, Permutation of the last layer) and I have learned approximately 100 algorithms, each one composed of 8 to 16 turns. The learning of the algorithms has a very strong resemblance to learning to type: in the beginning you have to identify what the next movement or letter is (from looking at the instructions or at the word), translate that movement or letter into an action of your hands and then repeat until the algorithm is done. Once you are fluent in typing, it so happens that you do not have to think of the individual keys anymore; your hands know the word and have an idea of how to translate it into keystrokes and, in fact, words that are not in your usual vocabulary frequently need to be decomposed on syllables or groups of letters that are familiar. One astonishing consequence of this example of muscle memory is that sometimes a word you have just typed "feels wrong", but you have to go back over it in order to confirm that, indeed, it came out incorrectly as your fingers were already pointing out. This feeling is the same with Rubik's cube: sometimes you perform an algorithm and before you are completely done you realize that something has gone wrong because it just does not feel "natural". It also happens to me that, for the most cases, I would have a hard time to translate the algorithms back into notation (yes, there is a set of letters to describe the turns), because I remember the "feeling" of the hands but not the individual movements. I would have to perform the algorithm really slow and the chances are that I would lose track of the algorithm half-way.

Some years ago I head about Destin from SmarterEveryDay.com who built a bicycle with inverted handlebar (turning it to the right would turn the wheel to the left) and demonstrated how hard it was to ride it. Many months later, he finally managed to learn how to ride on it, but now he cannot go back to the normal ones, because he falls over in the same way that he used to fall over in the first attempts with the backwards bike. I guess I tried to outperform him with my typing skills, but my hubris taught me a painful lesson. I do now know what I was expecting to get from learning a different keyboard layout, since it is hard to believe that I will ever get to be as proficient with any other layout as I am with the QWERTY, but the experiment was fun. Probably I am trying to say that it can be fun trying new things and that sometimes it is also OK to give up on all that effort once you are done with the experiment. Maybe I can inspire one or two of you, but in the meantime have a nice weekend.