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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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”.
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