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
Muscle memory what I know is actually two different things in your body. One is in your brain and the other is in your muscle.
Starting with the muscle – The more you do one thing the more you body gets used to doing this thing. On the level of your muscles this can include building new nerves/fibres or reinforcing the ones especially in use when doing a certain task. It also leads to the pathway from brain to muscle being more “alert” or “effective”.
With your brain you can think of every action you take and think fires of multiple regions of your brain – those regions have to work together to make your body do what brain wants. A big part of muscle memory can be taught of being the brain learning that if you do A, you want to do B after, and C after that.
So you essentially train your brain for a sequence of tasks, the more you do this the more those pathways firing neurons in your brain gets used, the more they get used the more they get “reinforced” in your brain. You are physically making new connections and reinforcing connections in your brain when excising.
When you throw a ball not only does you brain now knows it should “queue up” a few tasks like Aiming, moving arm backwards, tensing up certain muscles and releasing at a certain interval.
I don’t know medical terms etc so this is a bit dumbed down, but it’s what I was taught in school 🙂
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