For this experiment you’ll need two things: A sheet of paper and a pen or pencil.

Start at the left side of the paper and write something like the following, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” It doesn’t make any difference whether you print or use cursive.

Now try and recall how you moved your hand when you wrote. You wrote one or two words. Then you moved your hand to a new location where you wrote one or two more words. You moved your hand again, repositioning it for the next word, and so on.

Write the sentence again and watch how you position and reposition your hand. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Ah hah! See, what you normally do when writing involves two separate and distinct kinds of actions that you integrate without thinking.

That’s because you rest your hand in one place for control but are very limited in the area you can reach with the pen.

Let’s try one more thing. Consciously rest your hand in one place and draw the biggest circle you can without sliding your hand. Most people can’t make a circle bigger than 1 1/2 inch diameter. That’s it.

You write or draw in a small input area with precise finger dexterity, then you reposition your hand on the writing or drawing surface so you can continue the action. There’s no real limit to the size of the drawing surface you can work on in this way.

Remember the two actions and how they’re put together. The System I’m describing here does a comparable kind of thing. There’s the input tablet and the control tablet. The control tablet is used to reposition the input window.

Some people sort of slide their hand about without distinct stops. If they wish, they can do a similar thing with this computer input system by the way they use the control tablet.