itoowantone

Can you recommend books / papers where I can learn more about the following?

Once when I was doing a great deal of typing, writing papers for grad school, I began to notice regularly making a weird kind of typo, generally with words of two or three syllables. Sometimes I would type a completely incorrect, but properly spelled, word that was weirdly related to the intended word. Other times, the misspelled word consisted an A part and a B part. The A part was the normal word as intended. The B part was the suffix of a different word, but one also strangely related to the intended word. Strangely as in semantically, not phonetically, and semantically but not via any direction my conscious flow of thought had been taking. All my examples are at home on a spun-down drive, I wish I had them to show you.

I thought about what had to be going on in my head in terms of subsystems to support typing the paper and to generate those typos. I think there has to be: 1) A composer, thinking about the topic area and the paper I'm writing, 2) A chunker, taking the stream of thought from the composer and converting it into chunks to be handed to the typing subsystem, 2A) Retrieval by semantic keys, converting or reifying each chunk from the composer into chunks of letters/keyboard strokes to be handed to the typing/muscular control system, i.e. a semantic map, 3) Muscular control / sequencing for typing the characters retrieved in 2A.

Given that model, the typos I was seeing happened in step 2A above. A composer token was misinterpreted by the semantic mapper, with the incorrectly retrieved chunk typed properly by the muscle sequencing system.

Can you recommend books or papers that address these kinds of brain subsystems? How do I do research to learn if people have addressed the very topics I mentioned above?

And, finally, how far is your model from being able to model the behaviors I described?

Thanks!

Ok, thank you.. Thanks for your videos, clear explanations, your enthusiasm and the AMA.

I just moved to the Boston area. How can a late-middle-aged working guy best take advantage of physics resources at places here like MIT?