Some time ago, like three years or something, I wrote an article about the difference between typing a piece of prose and using voice recognition to do it. I ended, I think, by wondering what would be going on neurologically that might distinguish the two.

Yesterday I found myself having wires stuck into various muscles to try and find out why some of them seem not to be working as they should (the effects of childhood Polio). While I wouldn't recommend this as a pastime it did give me the chance to put my wonderings to the wire-wielding neurologist.

He was rather taken up with typing up the report on what he had just learned about my useless muscles but he did manage to point out that typing is a motor activity which involves the cerebellum and motor strip (which made me think of parking lots). Speech, meanwhile, sits in the temporal region of the brain. And although these bits aren't geographically that close (in brain-distance terms) there are so many connections between them that this doesn't matter. Apparently.

Nice to know but not quite what I was asking. So if any passing neurologist happens to read this, might s/he explain - very simply, please - whether the thinking involved when one is typing (not the actual typing itself) and the thinking that precedes using voice recognition are one and the same. After all, the voice recognition software gets hysterical if you pause for thought, while when you are typing you can pause as long as you want/have time for.