In which I am apparently of two minds?

[brooksmoses]

That was weird.

I was editing the previous post, and was adding a sentence starting with "I know", and had formed the words in the part of my mind that does the word-forming and where the "internal voice" comes from, but my fingers typed "I think".

That is clearly not a simple hit-the-wrong-key mistyping, or a spelling error. My perception is that I mentally formed the word "know", and I was aware of the shape of the spelling, and the roundness and sound of the "o" in the middle of it, as well as it being specifically the word I wanted. And what came out of my fingers was a related and entirely different word, as if whatever separate part of my mind is controlling my fingers was lagging behind and using predictive text to figure out what word to type next and simply made a reasonable guess and missed.

Which is probably not that far off of the truth, I imagine.

I think that this rarely comes up because often I think through the full sentence and then start typing, and I was typing sooner this time, and also the predictive text generator is pretty accurate.

But, yeah, that was weird to watch as it happened.

Comments

[redbird]

weird and interesting, yes.

[hrj]

I'm fascinated by this sort of substitution error when typing. Every once in a while I try to come up with taxonomies of them. The substitution of a similar word for the intended one. The substitution of a more common (but unrelated) word with a similar "opening". The substitution of a homophone in cases where the typist is perfectly conscious of the correct spelling of the intended word. Typing a work that appears later in the intended sentence.

I keep hoping that some cognitive linguist will study the phenomenon (or has done so and it will come to my attention). And I often wonder how this type of error intersects with the typist's degree of typing fluency and/or length of time they've been a fluent typist. I have visions of the neural signals to type words existing as coherent "packages" (rather than a conscious act of thinking about the spelling) and the a trivial "misfiring" connects the intended text with the wrong "packet", but one that has some sort of conceptual connection to the right packet.

[kiya]

And their connections to neurology and such - in my twenties I never did homophone glitches, and now I do them all the damn time, so what changed?

[hrj]

My completely-unsupported-by-experimental-evidence hypothesis is that a certain type of error develops specifically because of extensive typing experience. We train our brains through long practice and the ability to use "autopilot" based on this is the same function that generates the error.

[madgastronomer]

I think it was Spider Robinson who referred to these, usually aloud, as "thinkos".

[tshuma]

Fascinating. I’d love to learn how this kind of slip happens, and what’s going on in the brain when it does.