Learning how to touch-type has many implications for your academic career and professional life, as good typing skills allow you to get things done more quickly and communicate more readily. Increasingly, it also affects your social life, as more and more coordination with friends happens via computers or other web-enabled mobile devices. So the reasons to learn or improve your typing skills are numerous, and increasing each year. However, there is one more really good reason to get online and play some typing games: brain fitness!
Brain fitness is just what it sounds like: the health and ability of your mind. But what do typing games have to do with mental health? Well, learning anything new is good for your brain, and
I have a feeling that typing might be particularly good. We already know that learning to play instruments is a great mental workout, and so is learning handwriting (which helps you refine your fine motor control), and really, keyboarding is not much more than a combination of handwriting and playing the piano. As you learn how to type, you are developing a mental map of the keyboard layout in your head, in the same way you might code the location of piano keys or guitar chords. As hour practice it, your are constantly refining and strengthening these connections , and learning to access them ever-faster. Anytime you are learning to do something that requires great precision and great speed, you are definitely helping out your brain.
So as your browse this site and try out the various typing games and wpm speed tests, keep in mind at you are doing more than advancing your professional capabilities; you are also increasing the capacity of your mind.