How do we run when we decide to run?

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Suppose we are standing or walking and we decide we want to run, how does our thinking finally turns into physical action of running? How does our neurons trigger muscular action ?

In: Biology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

When you were a toddler you learned which muscles were involved in running and in which order you had to use them, you learned this by falling over a lot until you got the order right to stay balanced and upright while running. When you decide to run your brain just repeats that pattern by sending impulses down the nerves in the correct order and your muscles respond by contracting/relaxing in the correct order.

It’s essentially muscle memory, the same way you can drink from a glass or use a knife and fork, or type on a keyboard – at one point you couldn’t do it, eventually you figured it out, now your brain knows that action so well you can do it without much conscious input as far as moving each individual part/limb/digit

Try to do something you haven’t done before, and you can watch your finger be dumb for a while. Watch someone pick up a guitar and try to copy making a chord for the first time for example. They know what they want to do, they’re moving each individual finger but it isn’t going where you want it to. The only difference between that and running, is that we learned to run before we can even remember

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