Notes as I was switching from typing in QWERTY to Dvorak, and deductions made on how the brain encodes information based on the mistakes I was making.
read moreI’ve been learning Dvorak after seven to eight years of strictly QWERTY and I’ve noticed something that indicates how humans learn implicitly.
I’ve started by learning what’s called the home row (excluding “I” and “D”). What I’ve found is I mistype the letters I have not yet covered (I assume they are in the QWERTY location) even if the old QWERTY location has been relearned as a different character’s location.
This seems to indicate that I imagine keys being located in certain locations and relearning changes the keys’ location but I do not experience dissonance which indicates how the brain organizes such information.
Continuing my practice of the new keyboard layout, I’ve noticed that I often confuse the hand with which I use for any given key. I am correct in the finger I use to hit the key; I simply use the wrong hand.
Because I'm acclimated to different keys and their locations more than others, and I hesitate more on the keys I'm newer to, I sometimes skip the keys I'm not sure about because my brain is like "forget about the 'p' in 'inception', it's taking too long to type, just move onto the next letter."
Also, there's this setting on the mac, there may be on PC, not sure, that when the "command" key is pressed, the keyboard goes back to qwerty so that shortcuts such as copy are more convenient and the keys aren't an opposite sides of the computer.
I'm wondering if it will cause dissonance.
Edit to try to understand (made 4/17/14): So next to the a in qwerty is an “s” and in dvorak it’s an ‘o’. And the qwerty’s ‘o’ is up in the top right of the keyboard. WHat will happen is that sometimes when I try to type ‘o’ in Dvorak is that I’d type the new ‘o’ location and sometimes I’d type the old ‘o’ location, which essentially means that I organize things in a non-bijective mapping because I imagine the key being in two positions in once.