Does my brain adjust? Do my fingers stretch more? Do my hand muscles build up?
In: Biology
Yes, all of the above. Your muscles and joints will develop strength and flexibility as you train them, but the most interesting part IMO is what your brain and nervous system are doing.
When you practice a repetitive movement or sequence of movements, the neurons in your brain responsible for sending the right signals at the right times for this movement, will start to optimize for it. They’ll find shortcuts, and they’ll start to delegate this work outwards.
The first time you do it, your conscious mind might be thinking “ok, now pull back on the first joint of the index finger, and release the tension on the second joint of the ring finger, wait a moment, then contract both muscles riiight aboouut *now.*”
The tenth or hundredth time you do it, your conscious mind is just thinking “Do the thing again now,” and the sequence of individual steps is no longer happening in your conscious mind. It’s becoming automated by the big chain of neural wiring which translates your conscious mind’s intentions, to your body’s actions. It’s almost as if your nervous system has learned a “macro”. This processing and automation, which transforms one complex command like “throw the ball” into a sequence of simple signals like “contract the triceps,” “tighten the abdomen”, etc… Some of is in your brain, and some of it is actually happening further out in the rest of your nervous system – like in your spinal cord, or in the nerve clusters which connect your limbs to your spine.
It’s useful for your body to make some decisions “locally,” because it takes a little bit of time for messages to travel back and forth between your sense organs, your brain and your muscles. Anything which requires very fast reactions – like pulling your hand off a hot stove for instance – works better if it doesn’t have to wait for an entire back-and-forth communication between your brain and your limbs. Imagine a nerve cluster in your arm is going like:
> “Uh oh, i see sudden intense heat+pain signals coming from the hand. But it’ll take like 300 milliseconds for this info to reach the brain and for a response to come back. Every other time I’ve seen pain like this, the brain responded “WELL PULL THE HAND AWAY, DUMMY!” Sooo, I’m just gonna jerk the arm muscles back right now.”
But this doesn’t work just for pain reflexes, it works for pretty much *any* repeated stimulus/response… including the tactile feedback of playing guitar. If you want to do a rapid-fire series of hammer-ons and pulloffs to play a trill, you can’t afford to be waiting around for your brain to receive confirmation of one movement, before executing the next one. Your hand needs to register the feeling of your fingertip hitting the string on the fretboard, and respond immediately by lifting the finger again, and so on. The only way that can happen fast enough for *real shreddage*, is if the nerves in your arm and hand learn to do it without the brain’s help.
So, in a quite literal sense, your body learns how to do stuff! We call it ‘muscle memory’, which isn’t a perfectly accurate name… But it’s catchier than “musculoskeletal and nervous system memory”.
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Edit: Maybe you’ve heard that when farm chickens are killed for meat, sometimes they’ll chop a chicken’s head off and *the headless body will run around for a while!* The reason why this is possible, is basically the same reason you can play guitar. The “processing power” needed for walking and running, is not contained entirely in the chicken’s brain. The rest of its nervous system is able to handle the basics of walking all by itself. (but not the more advanced parts, such as deciding where it wants to go.)
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