Once you learn to ride a bicycle, even if you don’t touch it for years, you can still go smoothly when you pedal again. Some people call this “muscle memory,” where the muscles remember how to ride a bicycle.
But if you have played piano music for many times, you will become rusty if you haven’t practiced it for a while, so why can’t your muscles remember how to play the piano?
Remember it’s not the muscles that move, it’s the nerves!
Whether you learn to ride a bike or play the piano, you are learning movement, which is the basis for eating, dressing, and taking care of yourself, as well as the way to impress people around the world by demonstrating motor skills (e.g., the World Cup final where over a billion people watched 22 people chase and control a spherical object).
When a movement is mastered, memories of how the muscles were mobilized (e.g., which muscle exerted how much force at which time) are stored for later repetition of similar movements, hence the term “muscle memory”.
It is not the muscles that remember the movements, but mainly the nervous system. In the process of learning movements, the morphology of nerve cells in the brain and cerebellum, as well as the signaling function between cells changes permanently, and the way the muscles contract only changes when the instructions from the nerves change.
The process of learning movement is different from learning knowledge points, such as the principle of bicycle forwarding, which can be understood by listening to someone else tell it once, and can then be told to the next person. You have to get on the bike and practice a few times before you can master it, and it’s hard to tell others how you learned it.
It’s hard to tell others how to learn.
There are two types of “learning” processes for new movements, and the process is similar, although the rate of improvement is different for each person.
For example, when you learn to ride a bicycle, whether you get good at it once or after a month of hard practice, the process of finally learning to keep your balance is often instantaneous, from being unsteady one minute to suddenly “discovering” it the next. “Got the knack. The process of learning to play a piece of piano music, however, is often a gradual process of becoming proficient from sporadic to rusty, with progress accumulating continuously and slowly.
Whether the progression is sudden or continuous depends largely on the demands of the movement.
Riding a bicycle requires coordination of the whole body, adjusting the center of gravity of the body according to the position of the bicycle and the person, adjusting the direction with both hands, controlling the speed with both legs, and finally making the bicycle move forward without falling to one side. The movements that need to be coordinated focus on the coordination of multiple parts of the body, are coarse, allow for slight deviations (e.g. changing positions of the arms and legs and still maintaining balance), and allow for sudden leaps in level.
Another type of need focuses on speed and accuracy, such as playing the piano with precise control over which keys to press, when to press them, and how hard. Such actions are usually more elaborate, and the process of gradual improvement is visible to the naked eye and seemingly endlessly refinable.
These two types of needs are not either/or; sometimes there are two needs for one action. For example, riding a bicycle without falling relies primarily on coordination, but in a time trial or acrobatics, riding a bicycle additionally requires precise control of speed and direction. The same is true for many other daily activities and sports, such as climbing stairs, jumping rope, dancing, and playing ball.
And whether learned suddenly or gradually, progress in virtually all movements occurs gradually. Although the first few times you learn to ride a bike it may seem like the same back and forth, as if you’re not making any progress, the nerve cells are silently planning the movements, and at some point they will “suddenly” build up! “It’s just that there is no way to predict when this “suddenly” will happen.
Some moves are unforgettable, and some are not.
The speed of learning the movements can vary from fast to slow, and the memory retention time after mastery can range from tens of minutes to decades.
Once you learn a coordinated movement like riding a bicycle, you can still maintain your balance when you pedal again, even if you haven’t touched the bike in decades. Also, the more consistent the motion and the more it is repeated, the better the memory retention, as in swimming, where the same stroke is repeated over and over again.
For example, in swimming, the same stroke is repeated over and over again. For movements such as the piano, which require speed and accuracy, the memory starts to fade soon after you stop practicing, and you forget more and more as time goes on. The more different and intermittent the motions are, and the more fine-tuned they are, the faster they will be forgotten, just like in basketball, where you rarely shoot continuously and the angle and distance vary each time. “.
If the action consists of two demands, the speed of forgetting may not be the same for both. It’s like not riding a bike for years and then getting back on without falling, but maybe slowing down and riding out of a jagged corner. A study that tested a ski-like movement found that subjects could still perform similar movements after a 10-year break in practice, but with a 32% decrease in amplitude and a 20.4% decrease in frequency.
Although many of the movements feel like they have never been learned, there is no need to rush, as when they are relearned they will improve significantly faster than in the initial learning phase and can quickly regain their previous level.
The left chart shows slow progress when first learning, while the right chart shows fast progress when relearning. The shorter the interruption, the less you forget and the faster you recover your original level.
In addition to the characteristics of the movements themselves, accelerated forgetting can occur when the initial learning of the movements is limited, when the movements are not mastered, when the time to stop practicing is long, and when the movements are interfered with by other movements (e.g., a person who used to play badminton well, switched to tennis for a month, and then returned to the badminton court will be less good) [4, 7].
In summary, when learning movements, regardless of whether progress is immediately visible or not, the nervous system silently progresses through practice and stores the memory, so that even if it has not practiced for a long time, it can retrieve the memory of the previous movements when it picks them up, either quickly or slowly.
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