20210829 : Muscle memory

In recent times, I have encountered the phrase "running around like headless chicken" and each time I have thought, surely whoever coined that phrase had no idea - the headless chicken is not running anywhere, period.

It got me thinking on another thing - "muscle memory". Something I have heard so many times. And have taken for granted a lot.

Every indication now was contrary to that understanding. If my muscles, for all their repetitions of so many things had done , had an iota of memory, something would have moved.

Sure, they have memory. Every cell has dna which is a record or memory of the entire body. But it is purely biological. Unconscious. There was no conscious memory.

Here is my thinking:

We can regularly exercise and feed it nutritional food. But we can only make muscles strong, flexible, agile, etc. But memory, no way. Without the brain or mind more specifically, they are nothing.

When Neeraj Chopra threw the Javelin, he didn't know the angle, he didn't know the force, he didn't even wait to see where it landed. He just knew, without thinking, that it was the winning throw.

How did that happen?

I have played a lot of basketball in my time. Till date I have not known how much it weighs. Sometime long back, I knew the court dimensions. I have no idea about the dimensions of the board or basket. That's not just me. I am sure most of us didn't know. Yet most of us could throw the ball from most distances, from most heights and create different trajectories to score a basket. How did that work? Surely a conscious mind would need all those parameters to do the calculations to get it right.

My thinking is, as we do something repeatedly, it moves from the conscious to the subconscious. So we don't have to think about it.

But more importantly we have to do it incorrectly many times for the mind to calibrate the action.

Much like they depict in movies, where a long distance sniper needs a few trial shots to be able to calibrate and fine tune to take a fatal shot with corrections.

When we played basketball, we would do what was called shooting practice. Basically trying to score a basket from different points several times. I now realise it was for fine-tuning and calibrating the mind. While it was very physically demanding and we hated it, there was much more non physical going on. So that, in a match situation, from any angle, from any distance and any trajectory we wanted, the mind didn't have to think, but just the thought made the right position of the wrist, and release the ball with the right pressure needed for the shot.

Of course, I have taken the basketball thingy as an example because it was close to me. But I assume it to be true for anything we aspire to be good at.

There probably is no shortcuts but practice for a long time. To move things from the conscious to subconscious an calibrate it...