It seems like the idea of “muscle memory” spans many aspects and activities of life, from small fine motor movements such as playing an instrument, to large movements such as gym exercise or running. The list goes on. What is this phenomenon?
In: Biology
Your brain tells your body to take an action. There is a path from your brain to your body part doing the action. The first time you do it, you get lost a couple of times and take a wrong turn. After a couple of times, the path is familiar. After taking the path enough times. your brain makes shortcuts. The more you repeat an action, the more shortcuts your brain makes. It’s a way to streamline processes.
Brains work in funny ways. A “trigger” action can result in a repeated, practice motion. The more you repeat an action after a trigger, the more likely you’ll act on muscle memory.
This can range from almost anything in your daily life, from how you apply toothpaste and brush your teeth, to how you comb your hair, what order you get dressed in, which foot gets the shoe put on first, the pocket you normally keep your phone/wallet/keys.
For me muscle memory is like when I haven’t ridden my bike in a long time, but when I get to a hard part of the ride that is familiar to my body, I naturally have the strength to do it fairly easily because I’ve done so many times before.
I don’t remember my pincode, I remember the motion I make with my hand when I enter the pincode.
There are multiple levels to how your brain processes your actions.
There are parts of your brain that operate “intuitively”, i.e. without your conscious decision. And there’s your conscious part of the brain, that’s the one you’re using when you’re thinking.
Take walking and moving your legs for example. You can decide to, for example, rotate your leg at your knee for 10°. However, when you’re walking, you’re not thinking about moving individual joints. You’re just consciously deciding to take a step, and your “muscle memory”, i.e. your conscious brain already knows what kind of a complex movement in the leg it needs to do to make you walk.
Your brain remembers certain kinds of motions and performs them without your conscious effort. That’s essentially what muscle memory is.
It’s been a minute since I took a cognitive psychology course so hopefully I don’t butcher this (and please correct me if I do)
Muscle memory is a part of procedural memory. When we first learn a new skill we are using declarative memory. Essentially, we have to think of every individual step of the skill as we do it. The more we practice it, the more these pathways (the steps we are taking) in our brains become reinforced. Over time, the pathways become so reinforced (through practice, specifically deliberate practice) that the skill moves into procedural memory where we can learn execute it without much thought.
Think of driving a car on the freeway. When you first learn you are using declarative memory. When you change a lane you think to yourself “okay, signal. Now, check my mirrors, over my shoulder, etc. Okay now that I see it is clear I am going to turn the wheel slightly to the left.”And so on. With a bit of practice you may be able to do that with a little less precise thought. Eventually, once you’ve been driving for a while, it will be moved entirely to procedural memory and you’ll be like me where you slap on an audio book and think “oh shit I’m at my exit” without ever thinking about what you were doing.
EDIT: I just realized what sub I’m in and that wasn’t exactly ELI5, my bad
Actually muscle memory has to do with having motor neurons in your muscles.
For example. Say you are learning to dance. At first you are AWFUL at it, not because you can’t do it but because you’ve never actually moved your body in that way and your muscles need to actually form the motor neurons in your muscles to help you to be able to move that way.
The more you repeat the attempted moved, the better you become, the stronger the connections of motor neurons have in that muscle.
If you don’t do it for a while, the connections with die down but in general you will pick it back up quickly because the connections have been made before.
When I was a kid, there was a large tallgrass field between my house and my neighbor’s. When we started going over to each others’ houses, it was really hard to go through the tall grass.
After a while of going over all the time, we wore down a path through the field.
Then, our parents decided just to get out their lawnmowers and mow the path down.
Years later, when I looked at our houses on Google Earth, I could see the path in the aerial photography.
That’s what happens in your brain when you learn a new motor skill. At first, your brain has to find a path between neurons. The more you do it, the more solidified and permanent it becomes.
I actually use this in my classes on CBT, because it kind of works for thought pattern development as well.
Effectively, repeating an action makes your brain more efficient at that action. The brain creates very specific pathways to send the information about which muscle groups to activate when exposed to trained and reinforced triggers.
So, for instance, walking up a flight of stairs. I’m tall, so I generally walk up them two at a time,, doing so for decades now. Walking up the stairs one at a time feels ‘unnatural’, and requires me to be more intentional with each step, oftentimes catching myself going for two at a time. This is because the brain wants to use the efficient pathway, and doing something different requires much more effort than doing it the way you have already trained yourself on.
A good practice for this is the pattern you dry yourself when you get out of the shower, or a related, relatively automatic task, something you *really* don’t think about. Do it deliberately in a different pattern, and you’ll see what I mean.
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