Re: forward masking (was: Re: Hugos)

From: Barbara Lamar (altamiratexas@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Dec 18 2000 - 10:32:23 MST


At 11:40 PM 12/17/2000 -0800, Jason Joel Thompson wrote:

>There is some sort of disconnect between the words that I have consciously
>formed, and the action my fingers take on the keyboard.
>
>Further evidence, IMO, of the society of mind-- glitchy communication
>between 'conscious-sentence-forming-brain,' and
>'make-the-fingers-type-letters-brain.'
>...

>I wonder if 'make-the-fingers-type-letters-brain' isn't instinctively doing
>a look-up on the word in question to save time. That is to say: I wonder if
>it doesn't also have some direct access to 'proper-vocabulary-brain,' and it
>bypasses 'conscious-sentence-forming-brain,' when it thinks it knows what
>the word is.

I've noticed this sort of thing pre-conscious activity as well, not just
with the hands but also with the eyes. Sometimes when I'm walking in the
woods I suddenly close my eyes and only afterwards become consciously aware
of the fact that I was about to walk into an eye-level twig. When I was a
kid I used to run around in the woods at night with no flashlight, and
somehow my bare feet avoided sharp objects. Someone did some research on
this within the last couple of years, but I can't remember who, or where it
was published. I think you could still say that the sorts of typing
glitches we were discussing result from information processing errors
rather than from hand-brain coordination errors. Hand-brain coordination
errors would seem to result in a different sort of error, such as when you
type g instead of h.

Barbara



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