While I’ve been learning to type again with my keyboard I think I’ve gained quite a few insights on muscle memory. The event of sitting behind a keyboard again after a month of being on a holiday and getting right back into typing has been fascinating me time and time again. However while learning to type with my wearable keyboard I’ve noticed that the orientation of the hands or the spatial component is often a determinant for muscle memory.

This is an exercise you can try: Try typing a short piece of text on a keyboard, then turn your hands upside down while keeping them in the same position, now try typing the same sentence again.

For me, this doesn’t work and the same goes for my wearable keyboard, even though the keys stay with the hand, the orientation and spatial component is crucial for the muscle memory to work it seems. Nowhere in the wikipedia article on muscle memory I’ve found any mention on this.

There is an example of muscle memory where orientation and space don’t seem to be a part, Speed cubers can do the rubik’s cube behind their back and possibly while hanging upside down, they rotate the cube so they need to re-orient every time. To me this is different from just typing on a flat keyboard.

So, what do you think, does muscle memory have a spatial or orientation component in it?