Finger Memory
It’s pretty obvious that a lot of knowledge is learnt on an subconscious level - you have to “learn” how to walk, type, play a guitar, a piano, etc…
You can understand the mechanics, but until you’ve practiced, you can’t do it without “thinking about it”.
This was driven home to me recently in an amusing incident.
I’m trying to convince Joe that emacs is the one-true-way as far as editors go for developers, and he asked me how to “switch to the other open buffer”.
This is an operation that I perform every single day hundreds, if not thousands of times. But could I remember the keyboard sequence?
Nope.
I had to sit down in front of the keyboard with emacs in front of me and have my fingers teach my conscious mind that the command it couldn’t remember was Ctrl-x o.
Smart things, those fingers.
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Steve Lacey, software developer at Google, British, married to the lurvely Nabila, dad to the wonderful Julian and Jasmine. Living in Kirkland (near Seattle), WA.
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About this Entry
This page contains a single entry by Steve published on March 21, 2006 9:49 PM.
Flagged Articles #13 was the previous entry in this blog.
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I have come to the same conclusion in my teaching of the writing skill in English. English spelling, being notoriously inconsistent, is best learned by the fingers. This means a lot of drilling in real writing.