I've just had a fascinating experience that I wanted to share here. For those not familiar with it, GnuPG [1] is a system for digitally signing [2] and encrypting [3] emails and other data. Since I created my GnuPG key pair, I used to sign all my outgoing emails, but unfortunately this caused many troubles to those not familiar with digital signatures. I often received replies from people not able to view my emails in MS Outlook (because it ignores standards), or found random garbage at the beginning/end and thought the message was corrupted (not realizing that the actual message was in between). Until a couple of weeks ago or so when I decided to only sign messages when required, or when the receiving party is familiar with GPG. And it just happened that I didn't have to sign any emails until tonight. I clicked "send" and a window popped up asking me for the key's passphrase (a long password). I sat there for a while trying to remember what my passphrase was. I entered one but it was wrong. I tried a couple more but no luck. Finally, I realized that I forgot my passphrase!

At that point I was really worried. Losing the passphrase means not being able to open a good deal of emails, and having to change my key pair. I kept on trying more possibilities but nothing worked. However, I noticed something. While typing the passphrase, my figures sort of moved by themselves when typing certain combinations of characters, and continued to type what I felt was a correct part of the passphrase. I couldn't figure out what I was actually typing, but it just felt right typing those characters. I tried to type the passphrase in a text editor to read what I was actually typing instead of seeing *s, but as soon as I switched from the passphrase dialog, my fingers stopped acting by themselves. This also happened when I tried to look at the keyboard or think of what I was typing.

Realizing that, I thought to myself: I need to replicate the same mind state and surrounding environment I used to be in while typing the passphrase. I need to be relaxed, not nervous about what's going on. I need to be thinking about the message I've just typed instead of how to type the passphrase. I decided to leave my computer seat, relax, and try to forget what happened.

Half an hour or so later, I felt comfortable enough to try again. I came back to my workstation, opened Thunderbird, chose an email to reply to, typed in some content, and hit send. A window popped up as usual asking me for the passphrase. Fortunately, I didn't think about typing the passphrase, so my fingers started to work by themselves. They hit the right combo followed by an enter, and voila, it was a success!

Not believing myself that I actually did it, I opened up another composition window and tried to send a blank email. When I wanted to enter the passphrase again, I only managed to remember the beginning of the combo. I kept repeating the process, each time letting my fingers type a few more characters and then making note of them, until I remembered the whole thing.

It feels strange when one part of your body acts on its own, repeating what it's been used to, and when you try to think about what's going on, it just stops. It took some training to let my body act and think about it at the same time, but the result was well worth it; I recovered the lost passphrase!