Saturday, December 13, 2008

Muscle Memory part 1

Again, again, again.....

There is just something amazing about repetition. The more you do something the easier it gets. The principle of muscle memory applies to everything from typing to playing a song you have not played in six months on the piano by memory. There is just a point where your brain kicks off and some kind of unconscious memory kicks in.

I can literally sit down at a piano and play songs from memory with my eyes shut. You can't really attribute this to memoriztion of the notes because if you asked me what note each of the songs started with, I don't honestly think I could tell you. It is just that after playing my favorite songs over and over and over again, my fingers know exctly when and where they need to be.

How do my fingers know without my explictly telling them where to go? The answer to this is actually quite simple. Each action is completed by a specific sequence of nerve firings in the brain, and the more a pathway of firings is used, the more natural it becomes. This is n amazing phenomenon, but as ever, the human body is far from perfect....

To be continued...

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