OneAndOneIs2

Muscle memory's a funny thing.

For starters, the name is a misnomer - muscle has no memory. It's all done by the brain, in quite a clever way:

When you first try to perform a new action, your brain has to control each individual muscle to make the required action happen. You have to think about it and work out exactly how to move, and how not to move, and what works best and what isn't so good... it's a lot of overhead.

So what your brain does is record sequences of movements, which it can then replay at any time. So when you walk, for instance, there's almost no mental effort involved, despite the fact that you're using literally hundreds of muscles to co-ordinate moving and balancing. This is because you've performed that exact same sequence of movements thousands if not millions of times before, so your brain isn't doing anything complicated - it's literally just running the "walking" programme and making trivial, minor adjustments as needed.

Compare the difference between somebody just starting to learn to type with somebody who's been using a keyboard for years - the former will be doing a lot of hunt-and-peck and having the think hard about where the letters are, the latter may be typing without even looking at the keys, writing almost as fast as they can think.

The only difference between the two is that the second user has a bunch of records in his head, saying things like "when you want an 'e', move these muscles this far". More interestingly, sequences of sequences can be recorded: "When you want a 'the', use the 't' then 'h' then 'e' sequences"

If you ever wondered why you persistently make the same spelling mistakes (I'm forever writing 'keybaord', for instance) this is the reason - once a sequence has been learned, it's used whether it's wrong or right.

You may also have been in the situation where you were in the middle of writing a word, realised mid-word that you wanted to write something different.. and then finished writing the entire word anyway, even though you knew you were going to delete it immediately. When your brain runs a sequence, it can't easily interrupt it - "I've started so I'll finish"

The reason I mention all this is because muscle memory is one of those things that's so clever that we take it for granted and never really even notice it.. until something goes wrong. I've been noticing it a lot lately because, courtesy of my broken shoulder, I can't use my dominant arm much any more. And it's the silliest, most trivial things that cause me problems.

The most noticeable one? Breakfast cereal.

Normally, I just pick up the box, tip it to pour out some cereal, and think absolutely nothing of it.

But I have to pick it up with my left hand now. And my brain doesn't have any muscle memory patterns for pouring cereal with my left hand. So when I tip up the box, instead of the cereal pouring out as usual, it stays in the plastic bag, and the bag slides out and lands in the bowl.

Seriously. This is something that is normally so simple I take it for granted, but apparently my right hand knows something I don't, because when I use my left, I'm actually unable to pour cereal into a bowl.

Sad, isn't it?