Computers are shaping our minds in plentiful ways. By various reports, long stretches of screen time are making us less empathetic, more empathetic, less connected, more connected, less productive, more productive, dumber, and smarter. But it's also changing the meanings of words, according to a new study.
The standard QWERTY keyboard, named for the first six letters on the top row, has more keys on the left than the right. If you've been trained in proper typing protocol -- and don't punch everything in with your index fingers -- your right hand is in charge of 11 letters, while your left hand is in charge of 15.
That means typing on the left is a little less fluent, because you're more likely to hit a wrong key. Some words are just trickier to type than others. We don't like that, and so project that feeling onto the words, according to Daniel Casasanto, a psychologist at The New School for Social Research, and Kyle Jasmin, a Ph.D./M.D. student at University College London.
For their first test, Casasanto and Jasmin looked at a 1999 catalogue of over 1,000 words, which had been rated on a nine-point scale (from smiley face to frowny face). They also analyzed the Spanish edition, and made a Dutch one just for their experiment, because they were in the Netherlands, and recruited 132 Dutch native speakers to judge 159 words.
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