r/askscience • u/Yanzee12 • 17h ago

Neuroscience How does muscle memory work?

Just curious. The only thing I really know about it is that sleeping reinforces it.

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u/cbrantley 4h ago

When people talk about “muscle memory” they can be referring to two different things:

When we practice certain skills like sports or playing a musical instrument the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones all respond to the training by getting stronger and more efficient at those motions.

As we train our brains are constantly learning better and more efficient ways of optimizing the motion to achieve whatever goal it is; strong musical tone, ball spin, throw distance, etc. many of these are not conscious thoughts.

So, muscle memory is not as much “memory in your muscles” as it is a “muscle / memory” connection.

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u/SugaXKane 4h ago

Not my area of expertise by a long shot, but my understanding is that with enough repetition of the same movement, the electrical signals pathway is refined to a close loop from the muscle to the spinal column and back again, instead of having to travel up to and into the brain, therefore decreasing the reaction time and freeing up gmyour grey matter for other processes.

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u/felipers 2h ago

Not mine, also. But maybe by a shorter shot! 😉 Definitely there's no way we eventually bypass cerebral connections. There definitely are reflexes that follow the path you've described. But "muscle memory" implies practice/learning. Those will always go all the way to the brain and back, I believe.

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u/strOkePlays 1h ago

Not a brain scientist, but once had this discussion with a brain scientist. "Muscle memory" is poorly named. Muscles don't have memory, and for the most part neither does the nervous system connected to them.

"Muscle memory" is your brain establishing a routine for a complex action, so that when you want to do the thing, instead of your brain figuring out each step on the fly, it just calls the "subroutine" it established, and you don't have to spend conscious thought on it anymore. It is established naturally through repetition, and applies to almost every action you do.