How skills developed through muscle memory can be performed almost without any thinking?

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Such as,

* Riding a bike
* Playing a muscial instrument
* Touch typing on a computer keyboard

In: Biology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I mean, it’s literal memory in your brain. Repeating motions kindof saves those motions as a pattern in your brain. So then when you need to do the motion again, instead of having to think about every individual step, your concious mind can reference that memory as kindof a shortcut, and then only worry about tweaking finer details.

Practice a lot of those finer details and those all get their own sections of memory in the brain, and then you can focus on even finer details, or just do the original motion with near zero concious thought.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You ARE thinking, it’s just not conscious thinking. Your conscious experience isn’t the only kind of thoughts that exist. The subconscious brain isn’t at all like what Freud said, but it does exist and it processes information, too.

So basically, mastery of those kind of skills is when you can let your automated, non conscious mind do most of the work. It’s still making decisions based in inputs and directing actions, you just aren’t totally aware of all that.

The reason we aren’t conscious of it, probably harder to explain. My guess would be that it’s related to the evolution of consciousness. Our conscious experience, as humans, is very tied to complex tasks and complex social environments. So it never developed to be aware of things like riding a bike. And that makes some sense because bike riding is about balance and balance is controlled by much more “ancient” systems in the brain.