The usual explanation, according to Mental Floss, is ease of transition, from whatever your office-centric fingers might have been doing before — unclogging the copier, maybe, or trying to put a new carboy into the water dispenser — to typing merrily away. Those ridges help you find your place in the world, a tactile reminder of where your fingers should start and, perhaps, end during a session at the keyboard. As Aristotle more or less said, "Well begun is half done."
"Being mindful of these grooves improves your efficiency at the keyboard, increasing your typing speeds so you don't have to constantly glance down at your hands," writes Brooke Nelson for Reader's Digest. The Independent reports that it was patented by June E. Botich, though she thought we all needed more ridges on more keys — specifically A, F, J, and the semicolon. Is it actually helpful? According to Mental Floss, not really — touch typists don't have that much of an advantage over the rest of us. So go ahead and look, just to make sure. We won't tell.
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