Calling Richard Wiseman

By Kristin Fehlauer

I think what I do for a living is fascinating. And not just because I enjoy hovering in the space between two languages, or because I get a glimpse inside a range of industries otherwise foreign to me.

No, I’m also fascinated by what happens in my brain and in my body when I work. For instance, I’ve been touch-typing since grade school, though of course much more frequently during my high school years and following. It’s become so natural that I often prefer to work out my thoughts in this way. I sometimes talk to a customer on the phone about different ways to word a headline or a sentence, but I invariably offer to send a follow-up email with my ideas. Something about the physical act of putting words on (virtual) paper is more conducive to my creative process.

This kinetic sense can betray you, though. I sometimes find myself typing a homophone of the word I actually want: “know” when I mean “no,” for instance, as in “I have know idea.” It’s an odd phenomenon. Why am I typing a word that sounds like my intended term instead of one that is closer in spelling? Why don’t I type “I have note idea”?

Mysterious processes are of course not limited to my fingers, but also occur in the brain. In one sentence of the second paragraph above, in the time it took me to key in “typing since,” my mind called up and then rejected

• since I was x years old (“x” because I’d have to calculate my age)
• since 198x (again, need to calculate)
• since elementary school (something not quite right about the rhythm)
• since grade school (that’s it!)

 

Thought is such a lightning-fast process that my mind had made the decision by the time my fingers reached that point in the sentence.

I’m also keenly aware of the other processes I go through when working on a text. I recently wrote about how my career has changed over the past 17 years. The same holds true for how I interact with the various hardware and software tools that are integral to my line of work. I’ve come to prefer a certain view when emending a text using Track changes, for example. For translations, I used to have to shuffle between multiple windows on a single screen. At some point, I graduated to two monitors, and so had my source text on one screen and my target text on the other. Now more often than not, I have the two texts in a software program that displays them side by side in a very narrow view, to the point where if I look at them in the old single-screen view, they seem too far apart.

I’m aware of all these processes, but I want to know more! Where can I find the scientists who investigate this kind of thing? I want to sit down with a team of specialists who will track my eyeball movements along with my hands as I type and can see what bits of my brain light up for how long and how intensely.

is the first name that comes to mind when I think about the science of the everyday. He’s a British professor who conducts research into various aspects of psychology, such as how people respond to lies and humor. I would love for him and his team to tackle the questions of how language professionals work with language. Sadly for me, I don’t think any of this has broad enough appeal to interest him. But if anyone out there can put us in touch, please do!