Keyboarding and Muscle Memory
The curious thing about learning this keyboard, however, has little to do with how hard it was to switch from Qwerty to Colemak as it was to switch to Colemak from Qwerty having in a previous time been very good at typing in the Dvorak keyboard layout. I have not typed Dvorak for at least five years, and I cannot even recall to you the keyboard layout without thinking very hard about it; even then, I would probably not have everything correct. Nonetheless, many of the mistakes that I make when typing in Colemak have nothing to do with my Qwerty skills. Rather, upon reflection, I realize that many of the mistakes that I make on the Colemak keyboard are from me typing the Dvorak keystroke rather than accidentally typing the Qwerty one.
It appears then that my muscles still remember how to type in Dvorak, and when I put my mind into that state where I am typing in “non-qwerty” mode, it seems that my muscles default into Dvorak instead of Qwerty when I make a mistake. Is that not a weird and funny little thing? You would think, or, at least, I would think, intuitively, that the keyboard I am most familiar with would give me the most trouble, not one that I have not typed in for at least five years!