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The Finger Knows, even if your brain does not - Passwords

Was reading an interesting article, now that I have lost the link, I may not have it here, though I would fill that in once I get hands on it.

This article was how the fingers knows what you are typing even though your eyes reading the content says you typed in wrong. This was done in a research that talks about how they introduced typos, some of the typos were introduced even when it was typed proper and some typos were corrected randomly. The conclusion of the study was that, the finger paused a second, when it typed fine, but the eyes looking at the screen, saying you got it wrong. The pause is because of the auto recognition of the fact by the fingers when you make a typo or that you are sure that you got the correspondence between the eyes and the fingers.


Reading the article, made me wonder, have we not always remembered our passwords for different sites. Many a times I have had the opportunity to go to a website and even without thinking for a moment, the fingers go and have the passwords right. Is it more a autonomic movement of the fingers based on the password that is recorded or the brain feeding the password to the fingers. Somehow, this convinced me about the fact that the fingers operate and are controlled in a manner that records the pattern to type in the password into the password, rather than remembering the password. Thats the reason when many a time you get the password wrong, This is a solid behaviour pattern on our end, as we may remember a password as something and try it and not getting through, your pattern recognition ability helps you with identifying the password due to the quick movement of the fingers over the keyboard to achieve the same effect.

Remembering passwords therefore has another way of remembering, it need not be a set of letters or numbers and do not require to have a meaning, your brain remembers patterns as well as the esoteric mnemonics we use to produce our passwords. Just remember the pattern, if it means something well and good, if it does not too, it works, your brain knows the combination. But there is a catch to this, Keyboards are different and the keys are placed in different locations, I remembered the pattern to my banking password, funnily was not able to replicate the pattern in a mac and a net book, the finger fumbled and the size of the keyboard, the machine that you operate on all matters when it comes to remembering passwords.

This is also the same way the newer password combinations and identification mechanism work, you have a set of pictures to identify as your password, in the same order to ensure that you select the same set of pictures in the same combination to get authenticated. Our brains are wired to handle such complexities or patterns, and this study is an eye opener in the way we use our machines and evolve passwords.

Lets standardize the keyboards, at least the patterns should match, but then how do we address the issue of different sized keyboards?

P.S Searched the web and got the link, it was a wired article. Check it out here

Click here for the article
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