Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Today, typing is just a normal part of our daily life. But did you know it can actually be making you smarter?
When you type, your brain is using a number of cognitive processes that you are likely unaware of. If you’ve been typing from a young age, it may be as automatic to you as breathing or driving a car. But in reality, touch typing involves interaction between language, visual, and motor skills simultaneously.
By activating many different parts of your brain at the same time, touch typing is a great brain-building exercise that increases neural pathways and improves function and memory consistently over time. It is starting to be considered a fundamental piece of cognitive learning for children as well, along with reading and writing.
Here are some of the ways touch typing is helping improve your brain function:
Improving Memory
When you type using the touch-typing method, you are activating quite a lot of memory skills. Muscle memory in your fingers and hands tells you the position of the keys and the spacing between them. You also have to remember how to spell words and the functions of all of the different keys.
When you are utilizing these two different types of memory simultaneously, you are strengthening that section of your brain. If you want even more benefit, try turning off auto-correct. When you make a mistake, correct it immediately by deleting the word and retyping it. This helps you build your vocabulary with correct spellings instead of consistently making the same mistakes.
Engaging Both Hemispheres of the brain
Touch typing requires the use of both hands at the same time. So, while we might favor a certain hand while throwing a ball or writing on paper, we don’t do that while touch typing.
This kind of activity activates both hemispheres of the brain and challenges the hand-dominance that is present in other activities. Most of our daily activities end up leaving the less-dominant side of our brain dormant or inactive. When typing, you are engaging your motor skills as well as your language processing centers and strengthening connections across the entire brain.
Strengthening Hand-Eye Coordination
In the same way typing encourages connections between each brain hemisphere, it can help with the connections between the “seeing” and “doing” centers of your brain as well.
If you have difficulty with coordination, learning to type will be challenging at first. But practicing typing will actually improve your hand-eye coordination across the board. As you get better at typing, you may even get better at throwing and catching!
It turns out that the benefits of touch typing are greater than initially thought. In addition to improving overall computer use communication skills, typing can actually make you smarter. It is a brain-strengthening exercise that engages many different processing centers of your brain simultaneously.
By practicing touch typing, you can improve your memory, language, and motor skills among many others. The repetitive and consistent nature of this activity makes it so we can focus on our work unaware of the complex cognitive process happening in the background.
Check out Typesy Community and exchange ideas related to touch typing, keyboarding, learning, technology, and Typesy program itself. Login with your Typesy Account here: https://community.typesy.com/
Originally published at https://www.typesy.com.
