When you are typing away at your computer, you don’t know what your fingers are really doing.

A new neuroscience study found that when typing most people are not thinking about where the keys are on the keyboard and actually have trouble visually recreating the key layout on a keyboard. I'm doing the same exact thing right now, I'm not really thinking about what I'm doing, I'm just moving my fingers and words are appearing on my computer monitor.

The researchers said "The fact that the typists did so poorly at identifying the position of specific keys didn't come as a surprise. For more than a century, scientists have recognized the existence of automatism: the ability to perform actions without conscious thought or intention. Automatic behaviors of this type are surprisingly common, ranging from tying shoelaces to making coffee to factory assembly-line work to riding a bicycle and driving a car. So scientists had assumed that typing also fell into this category, but had not tested it." The researchers were however stunned that typing did not follow the normal suit of first being a conscious task then becoming a unconscious process over time. I think that it's a pretty cool discovery about something that most of us do daily. It made me realize I would probably struggle to recreate a keyboard if I had to. Researchers found that typists never  memorized the key locations, even when they were first learning to type. The researchers then give a very reasonable explanation, "the lack of explicit knowledge of the keyboard may be due to the fact that computers and keyboards have become so ubiquitous that students learn how to use them in an informal, trial-and-error fashion when they are very young." The researchers stated that since we are so connected with technology we can learn to use a keyboard without ever learning key locations.