Our muscles don’t have little brains that remember how to move. It has to be a subconscious process, right?
And why is is that sometimes when we slow down to think about a highly practiced action, it becomes more difficult to do?
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it’s actually nerve memory. the more we use a neural pathway, the easier it gets to do it, whether it’s recalling a memory or driving a car. this also explains why thinking about it can make it more difficult; we’re trying to use a different neural pathway for the same action.
I will attempt to answer the first part, but I am not sure about the second.
It is not about little brains in our muscles, but it is about our brain. Our brains have a bunch of neurons, each of which has a bunch of little tentacles at the ends (called dendrites). Memory, and muscle memory, and memory recall all rely on physical connections in the brain between these neurons. When you practice something, you are basically making more connections and stronger connection between neurons. Muscle memory is essentially what happens when your brain has a strong neural pathway in the parts of the brain required to undergo whatever task you are doing.
Passwords that I usually type on a keyboard can be hard to remember if I don’t have a keyboard available. My memory seems to rely partly on the practised movement of fingers on the keyboard. Recall is hard if I slow down to think instead. I would struggle if I had a keyboard with the keys in different places. I think this happens because I almost always recall passwords when typing, and what I recall is really the movement.
>Our muscles don’t have little brains that remember how to move. It has to be a subconscious process, right?
Yes. Your muscles don’t have little brains, but they don’t decide when to move anyways, they just react to control signals from your brain. And your brain DOES have a brain that remembers how to move. The more you execute a motion command, the more all the little sub-steps of that movement get chained together.
Like if you change your password to mznx5, for a while your brain will have to “say” : press m, then press z, then press n, then press x, then press 5. But after a few hundred reps, that order of things gets bound together so the brain can execute “type password” as one command and all the substeps fire off automatically.
Look up the concept of “neuroplasticity,” which is the idea that our brains build stronger connections between neurons the more that pathway is used. Neuroplasticity is at its peak in the first 20 years of our lives, which is why people who learn a sport or 2nd language at an early age are often able to learn it at a much deeper, more intuitive level than those who learn in adulthood.
There are two separate but related concepts.
The first is what we call a reflex action. It is an involuntary response to certain happenings that we can process and react to before the information even reaches our brain. There are “little brains” as you mention it not in muscles but along our spinal cord that can make these decisions.
Muscle memory, however, refers to someone getting very good at a skill by repeated practice. It’s the brain itself forming long-term memory to make a task happen subconsciously. It is *not* a reflex.
If you do think about it and make conscious effort, that memory is no longer being used and so the task seems more difficult and less “automatic”.
It’s a shortcut program in your brain.
When you hop in the car you don’t mentally think “insert foot, grab wheel, sit on seat, rotate torso, insert other leg”. You just hit the “get in car” program in your mind and the subconscious takes care of the rest.
Same for any other repetitive task. Once you have practiced it a few times you can do it “just like riding a bike”.
The neurons in your brain form stronger, more efficient connections for “muscle memory” actions so you can perform those things better than those with weaker connections. Think watching something on very strong vs spotty wifi.
I don’t know the answer to the second part for sure but my theory is when we mentally think through those same motions, we’re actually switching away from the “muscle memory neurons” and transitioning the thinking to our centers of logic and higher thinking in the prefrontal cortex. I.e., moving away from the strong connections to a different location in the brain.
<repost> 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, program and test the new wiring.
The result of which is that you now have a neural network which is setup to receive 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 signalling, condition of the road, etc.
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