Nervous System Is The Main Tool To Muscle Memory

“When we talk about muscle memory, we are referring to alterations that happen directly in the muscle fibers through the training that is carried out. If you practice some kind of physical activity, your muscle fibers will be transformed due to training. If you stop doing this training, the tendency is for your muscle fibers to transform again and go back to being similar to what they were before. However, if you go back to a training period, because they already had a previous experience, it is easier for them to gain that initial transformation again because they keep this memory of having already been transformed”, explains physiotherapist Andrea Peterson Zomignani , PhD in Neurosciences and Behavior from the Institute of Psychology at USP.

This explanation is taken, in common sense, as the idea of ​​what muscle memory is: the modification in the muscles that reminds you of how to perform that movement. However, Andrea adds that it is much more than that: “For a movement to become automatic, it needs to be performed repeatedly under various contexts. The individual has to register the errors that happened so that the nervous system registers the sequences of neurons that were more successful for that movement to happen. So, when I perform a movement for the first time or the first few times, I have a very high demand on several areas of my nervous system. From that, areas of my brain, my cerebral cortex, are activated.

Process
As important as modifying muscle fibers is for automated movement, it is the nervous system and its components that are behind the scenes. “It is a memory that, although it acts to cause muscle contractions, it is stored within the nervous system and these muscles are only activated because the nervous system is capable of managing this muscle activation in a certain order. We are talking about the automation of movements”, says the physiotherapist.

The base cores, according to Andrea, are fundamental in automation. They are structures found in the white matter of the brain and have the function of modulating the body’s movements: “One of the areas that are requested for there to be an ideal sequencing for this movement are the basal nuclei. They will be recruited so that adequate planning and, mainly, the initiation of the movement can take place. They process the information that came to them and return this ‘recipe’ of how the movement should be performed to the cerebral cortex, which will make the connection with the areas of execution of the movement. The order in which these areas are activated is very important for the movement to happen correctly and for the individual to be successful in the action he is going to perform”.

However, they are not alone and join the engrams. “For the automatic movement to happen, the nervous system, especially the region of the basal nuclei, participates a lot in this construction process of what we call engrams. They are neural network activation sequences that will consequently activate certain muscles for a motor action to take place. So, the construction of these engrams is essential for us to be able to automate these activities that are part of our routine”, explains Andrea.

Examples
All of this is done to direct awareness to more important problems while the body performs the automated motor action, in addition to saving energy, since a faster nervous sequence will be chosen for the movement in question: “Our conscious processing has an energy expenditure quite large and our awareness needs to be directed towards some specific actions, which many times are not related to the movement”, says the expert.

For example, it’s common to get distracted and take a common path when driving, as your thoughts were probably destined for other matters. “What we call performing actions without conscious processing is as if our nervous system, with the repetitions, were debugging the motor act, removing connections that are not important for the execution of that particular task”, completes the specialist. .

“When we talk about the ability to walk, we have some regions of the nervous system involved. This movement of moving the lower limbs needs to be more automated, because my higher levels of consciousness need to be concerned with actions other than the movement of my legs. So, my attention, for example, needs to be directed towards the objective of that march: where am I going, what speed do I need to have in my march, what time is it – am I on time, am I late or not? ; I’m entering the building where I work, what floor do I work on? That is, the areas of my nervous system linked to this more conscious processing are as if occupied with other functions: they are concerned with the context, but they are not the actual motor action”,