Muscle Memory – what is actually happening on a cellular level? How is it that my fingers know where the keyboard buttons are without conscious thought?
In: Biology
Procedural Memory is the ‘wiring’ in your brain which takes a simple command and efficiently executes in great detail without your consciousness having to micromanage. It’s the difference between you getting into your car to drive to work today and your very first driving lesson. This miraculous wiring happens while you are sleeping. It takes the experience that you’ve accrued during the day and it makes new neural pathways, interconnects existing pathways and strengthens your most used pathways. While you are asleep your muscles are inhibited, this is to facilitate the rewiring and testing of these pathways. You dream which is essentially your brain producing test data to run through and test the new wiring.
The result of which is that you now have a neural network which is setup to received sensory input and the most basic of conscious command and as those electrochemical signals run through and trigger those particular neural circuits those circuits in turn send signals onward to your spinal cord to trigger actual muscle movement. Bear in mind sensory data / stimulus is not limited to the “five senses” but also includes thermoception, itch, pressure, proprioception, tension, pain, equilibrioception, stretch, chemoreception, thirst, hunger, magnetoreception, chronoception and more.
So you can think of it like when you send a parcel – all that the Consciousness has done is put a name and address on the parcel this then goes to the Procedural Memory to then look up the address on GPS and plot a route to get there, all the while receiving and responding to sensory data like where other cars are on the road, what the traffic lights are signally, condition of the road.
Latest Answers