Different from the “Mere Exposure Effect”

My son said something one day when I picked him up from school that stuck with me.

“You type really fast,” he said to the lady at the front desk. “My mom does too.”

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it made me wonder, where did I learn to type like that? I had a typing class in middle school where we played games on a PC to help with finger placement on a keyboard. But the class didn’t help me type. It was like one day I was a bumbling idiot with flippers as hands, then the next, I was a professional typer.

It’s like the time my sister told me, “I’ve never watched Pokémon, but one day the theme song played and I knew all the words.” I had a similar experience with the song ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia.’ Everyone has experienced this. It’s what some would call “a glitch in the matrix”—a phrase meaning “an unusual occurrence that cannot logically be explained” (Jack Beresford on “People’s ‘Glitch in the Matrix’ Experiences Baffle the Internet: ‘Spooky and Unsettling’” from Newsweek.com). While another article explains this phrase to mean “Referring to a human experiencing déjà vu as caused by the Machines altering the Matrix” (Rebecca Flood on “Woman Captures ‘Glitch in the Matrix’ on Camera as Cut Lemon Repairs Itself” from Newsweek.com). But let’s focus on the first definition.

I tried to research the effect, and a glitch is the only way I can describe this. The closest effect was the “Mandela effect,” where a large population has a shared memory of an occurrence that didn’t happen. Like Pikachu not having black on his tip but actually does. However, while this is a shared experience, it’s not a single occurrence. It’s not a misrememberance. This is something that we can’t quite explain. But at the same time, you could put logic behind this phenomenon, so it’s not exactly a “glitch.” Yet, this is the closest definition to this shared experience.

You could say I slowly learned how to type by practice throughout years of subconscious practice. That would be the logical answer. You could say we learned those by constantly listening to the same song without even realizing it. I mean, our brains are interesting that way. As someone on Reddit said:

“it’s because you don’t actually remember the lines as well as you are convinced you do. you’re remembering the lines as you hear them, and your brain moves more quickly than the time it takes a word to be pronounced. so by the time the song has actually said the word, you’ve remembered it, and you think you knew it all along because you’re capable of keeping up with the song.” This was said 4 years ago, and their accounted was deleted, but they’re wise words nonetheless.

While this describes why we remember songs, does this describe how we know how to do things when we couldn’t do it before? Is it practice? This could be a possibility. Even if you don’t actively practice the skill, you could be subconsciously doing this while doing daily activities. It works for athletes anyway. They visually train outside of the field or court to better prepare for a game. Or this could just be from an anime I watched recently. This works in reverse, however. I’ve noticed that if I look at my old art too much, I’ll start to draw that way and lose my current abilities. So, this theory is starting to hold up. My boyfriend, for example, is pretty slow at typing. This is because he types on his laptop occasionally, while I type on my laptop daily. I’m in school, while he’s a mechanic. Of course, the more you do it, the better you’ll be.

As I write this, it’s turning into a research paper more than a contemplation. But maybe then, I’ll finally get the answer to why this phenomenon occurs. I’ve been working on this for about 5 days now. How time flies when you’re in the thick of things.

My conclusion to this curious thought is this- Maybe there’s a logical answer to all of this. Your mind works in mysterious ways. There are 116 psychology effects I encountered and read about on Wikipedia, and I’m sure there’s more. The closest I could find was the “Mere Exposure Effect,” which is “repeated exposure to something or someone often leads to increased liking or preference” (Viki Voice Coach on “10 Fascinating Psychological Phenomena that Shape Our Lives”). It was close but no cigar. Maybe there is a name for this occurrence, and I just haven’t found it yet. But for now, even if there is a complete and logical explanation, we’ll call it “The Repeated Exposure Effect.”