It’s kind of amazing that we don’t have to relearn how to walk, speak, read, or throw a shot put every single day. Thankfully humans have been able to evolve a mind that holds facts and movements to be brought up for later use.
Usually memory is thought of within the context of knowledge. Good memory is helpful for remembering the rout to get home, to pass your biology test, or to remember you forgot to turn the stove off before you left for work (which, believe me, will lead to your eggs exploding everywhere). But beyond remembering facts or ideas the brain also stores memories about movement. This is muscle memory, and it’s absolutely essential to getting out of bed in the morning and winning the World Series.
Muscle memory is the ability for the body to perform movement almost in an unconscious automatic manner. The ability to do a perfect snatch, to throw the tightest spiral possible, to exactly kick the ball into the goal at the perfect height above the defender. All without you hardly thinking about it. Like your body is able to do it all on it’s own, all it takes from your conscious mind is the decision to do so.
A lot of y’all probably already are endowed with some muscle memory for everyday tasks. How many of us can type on the computer with our eyes closed? I’m doing it right now. Only thing I left out was a u in computer.
That’s because so many of us pretty much grew up typing on computers. It has been instilled within most citizens of the first world since the mid 1990s.
In fact, when I was in elementary school, in the early and mid 90s, we had to have typing practice once a week in my school’s computer lab. At the time I guess teachers thought that these kids would actually need to be taught how to use a keyboard. But I’m pretty sure that has about died out. Computers and typing on them are so prevalent in our lives that kids start learning on their home computer shortly after learning to walk and talk. And those of us who learned to walk and talk use computers so much in our everyday life that we rack up all that typing practice almost non stop.
Now typing is pretty much instinctive for just about everyone who can fit their hand on a keyboard.
And think about the other side of the coin. My hand writing is absolutely awful. That’s because anything I hand write is temporary, and I’m probably the only person who has to read it.
I still usually do my initial brainstorming and rough drafts for essays, papers, and this blog in a spiral notebook. If you tried to look through that you would never be able to decipher it. But I’m able to relay all my thoughts to you from this divine computer intervention.
The basis of muscle memory is the physiological connection of motor skills from nerves througout our body and the brain. Essentially a motor skill is a movement that we have to first learn, and then practice to make it automatic. It’s something you start out having to think about but eventually you can get it down without thought. This is anything from babies learning how to walk to learning how to shoot a basketball.
Another term associated with muscle memory is motor learning. Motor learning pretty much describes the internal process the brain and body take to motor skills, be they basic or more complex.
Like everything else in our body it all starts with the firing of neurons in our brain and then the path down the spinal cord and nervous system to initiate physical movement. Muscle memory really doesn’t have anything to do directly with the muscle. There are no neurons or nerves that store information in a muscle. The skills and memory used for muscle memory come from the brain.
The cerebellum is the area of the brain that stores, learns, and transmits all the information for with motor control. The memories associated with muscle memory are stored here. Over time movements that are repeated get stored here, and the more times you repeat a movement the more memory you store about that movement. Essentially you memorize the movements for downhill skiing just as you would memorize the date of the fall of Constantinople for a history class (which is of course May 29, 1453).
I’m sure you long ago realized where all this repetition takes place, in practice. Every time you go to your football practice, tennis lessons, do sets of 5 snatches in a row, or pull out your cello, you’re practicing. You’re sending the information of movement through your body into your brain where the memory of it is stored. To develop muscle memory you have to of course, learn and practice these movements.
The book Outliers has become pretty popular in the motivational and self-help genre. Because of the success of Outliers the 10,000-hour theory has also gotten to be a very well known theory. For those who aren’t familiar the 10,000-hour theory states that no one is able to truly master anything until they have had 10,000 hours of practice at it.
Think back to when you first started learning all the skills of your prospective sport (or musical instrument, poetry writing, physics calculations, whatever it is that you do) and hopefully you can roughly estimate how many hours of pure practice have elapsed up until the present.
It’s probably not too close to 10,000 hours. If it is, congratulations, please give us all tips on how to stay the course to achieving that much practice time.
Within that 10,000 hours of practice you’re developing all kinds of motor control and muscle memory. 10,000 hours worth of repetition and performance builds up and is all stored in your brain. Yes, we all pretty much have the capacity to master almost anything simply because we have the capacity of working and storing 10,000 hours of muscle memories and motor skills in our brain.
Of course the ultimate goal of sport is not practice but competition, performing at your very best to win. Any competition or performance is essentially showing off how well you’ve retained all that information. Whoever demonstrates that they have the most information, and has perfected it best wins.
Of course there’s a downside to constant practice. If you were to go out all day and all night trying to practice you’d get monstrously tired. When you start getting tired you start getting sloppy. When you start having sloppy practice your brain may start retaining the all the inaccuracies. Then when you need the correct movement information your body will only have the wrong ones you taught yourself by over training yourself.
So now you know why we’re able to walk, or run a 400-meter race without relearning how every single time. Thank you cerebellum and nervous system for making it possible.
I encourage everyone to think about what all memory storage and memory transmission means.
Repeating knowledge or movement makes those things get stored in the brain. Every repetition adds to your memory. This means that we can essentially program our brains like a computer. We change the structure and how neurons fire by working at storing memories.
Next time you spike a volleyball or launch a javelin you’ll know that it’s not just your strong legs and shoulders that give you this ability, but your own hard work that put the memories of those movement in your brain allowing you to unleash your body on command.
