Muscle memory is always instinctive, it's hardwired in the human brain. Everybody can teach his/her muscles to act "on their own" for a task as simple as this without that much practice. (Remapping your keys in your keyboard helps a lot for comfort.)

But it's hard to get there, you have to find the commands, practice them, practice, practice, and all the while it would be easier to just reach for the mouse.

I think the trick is to forget about "practising" and just do it. If the command is really helpful, you'll end up using a lot anyway, but the mindset is different (forced practise vs need).

Indeed. It's like walking. You don't think you are walking, you just walk.

Everybody can teach his/her muscles to act "on their own" for a task as simple as this without that much practice.

I'm not sure how you can teach one's muscles to act "on their own" without too much practice. Maybe if one were trained by injection, Matrix style. :)

I wonder if mouse + keyboard input could be augmented by head gestures? NaturalPoint sells an economic mouse that can be operated by placing a reflective dot on a pair of glasses or a hat. What if instead of being a mouse, this could be an entirely alternate input device? You could read head gestures in the same way that the Wiimote detects different movements. These gestures would likely become "muscle memory."

This is also why I switched from T9 to whatever the other alphabet-entering system is for cell phones: it was just too frustrating not to know exactly what the output would be if I typed quickly.

I wonder how this over-learning might be related to reading behavior. I'm sure we've all seen those sentences where the author transposes the middle characters of each word while leaving the first and last characters the same; the sentence is suprisingly not difficult to read. Maybe in the same way our brain has a "good-enough" pattern matching behavior while reading, it quickly recognizes the pattern of the word we're typing and says, "I know this one, I'll take it from here."

Watching the experienced users using that interface is just amazing. They don't read the menu items; they know which direction is what by heart, probably in muscle memory.

I guess you could argue that without some speed, you can't really say you've learned something (what's the point in playing "Voodoo Child" at snailpace?), but the threshold is still there.

I wholeheartedly agree. I have become a 'keyboardist', as it were, just by using what I needed.

If you find a shortcut for something you use often, eventually you'll get used to using it, not because you want to, but because it'll feel natural to.

A new alt-key should be as difficult to master as a new coffee mug: You look at it for a fraction of a second and then put it into regular use without any further thought.

If you have to find keys, memorize them and 'practice, practice, practice', it's a sign you may need to master the basic tools of your profession first.

Good, free, simple touch typing software I like. I used it to switch from qwerty to dvorak and have gone from a peak of 78 wpm to 100 wpm (5 char = 1 word) over the course of 2 years. I think I was able to regain ~60 wpm after about 2 months, and then I stopped practicing a lot.

An especially useful feature is that you can specify your own text source, so I like to type a book I'm reading. In a way, it is a literature version of Guitar Hero.

On a related note, Dictator is a good piece of software for speed reading.

http://dictator.kieranholland.com/dictator.html

It uses the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) technique where words/phrases are flashed on the screen, so you don't have to scan a page. If you optimize the chunk size to the size you can take in instantaneously, the software greatly increases your reading speed (caveat, some stuff like tech reading is just inherently slow). It increased my reading speed by 300 wpm.

For example, I recently started using Emacs. At first you do have to do a lot of remembering of commands, but after a while you don't really think about the commands you are typing.

It's kind of like playing the piano. If you learn a song and practice it enough times, you probably don't remember every chord or note, but your hands play the whole song kind of like if your hands have a mind of their own. When a musician is asked something like what the chord progression of a song is, or what the notes to the melody are, usually he sits down at the instrument and plays it out with his hands first, triggering his memory.

So I think it mostly boils down to practice, rather than memory. When he says "EMACS is for people that can remember lots of stuff," that's not quite correct.

And sacrifice ever getting to the point where you don't have to think.