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Once you learn to ride a bicycle, you can still ride smoothly even if you don't touch it for many years. Some people call this "muscle memory," where muscles remember the movements of cycling.

Can play a lot of piano music, as long as a period of time without practice will become rusty, why muscle can not remember how to play?

Giphy remembers movements not muscles, but nerves. Whether learning to ride a bike or play the piano, it is learning movements. This is not only the basis for us to eat, dress and live independently, but also the only way to convince people all over the world through displaying motor skills (for example, during the World Cup finals, more than a billion people watched how 22 people chased and controlled a spherical object)[1].

After mastering an action, a memory of how to move a muscle (such as which muscle used how much force at what time) is stored for later repetition of similar actions, hence what some call "muscle memory."

In fact, it is not muscles that remember actions, but mainly the nervous system. In the process of learning actions, the morphology of nerve cells in the brain, cerebellum and other parts, as well as the signal transmission function between cells, permanently change. The instructions issued by the nerves change, and the way muscles contract changes accordingly [2-6].

The process of learning actions is different from learning knowledge points. For example, the knowledge of the principle of bicycle advancement can be understood after listening to others and can be told to the next person. When learning to ride a bicycle, it is impossible to learn it only by listening to the explanation. You must sit on the bicycle and practice it several times before you can master it, and it is difficult to tell others how to learn it.[4]

The process of "learning" new movements falls into two categories, and although each person progresses at a different rate, the process is similar.

For example, when learning to ride a bicycle, whether it is to practice once or practice hard for a month, finally learn to maintain balance often in an instant, the first minute is still unstable, the next minute suddenly "found" the trick. The process of learning to play a piano piece is often gradually becoming skilled from intermittent strangeness, and the progress is continuous and slow [7].

Whether the process of progress is abrupt or continuous depends largely on the demand for action.

Cycling mainly requires whole-body coordination, adjusting the center of gravity according to the position of the car and the person at that time, adjusting the direction with both hands, controlling the speed with both legs, and finally letting the car move forward without falling to one side. The movement that needs coordination focuses on the cooperation of multiple parts of the body, the movement is relatively coarse, a slight deviation is allowed (such as changing the posture of the hands and feet, still maintaining balance), and a sudden leap in level can be seen [7, 8].

Another type of demand focuses on speed and accuracy, such as precisely controlling which keys to press, when to press, and how hard to play the piano. Such movements are usually more subtle, and the process of gradual improvement is visible to the naked eye, seemingly endless.[5, 7]

These two types of requirements are not either one or the other. Sometimes there are two requirements for an action. For example, cycling does not fall mainly depends on coordination, but in timed competitions or acrobatics, cycling additionally requires accurate control of speed and direction. The same is true of many daily activities and sports, such as climbing stairs, skipping rope, dancing and playing ball.

And whether learned suddenly or gradually, virtually all movement progress occurs gradually. Although the first few times of learning to ride a bike seem to be the same, it seems that there is no progress. In fact, nerve cells are silently planning actions. When they accumulate to a certain extent, they will "suddenly" learn, but it is impossible to predict when this "sudden" will occur.

Some actions will never be forgotten, and some will not learn the action at a fast or slow speed. After mastering, the memory retention time varies from tens of minutes to decades.

Once you learn coordinated movements like cycling, you can keep your balance even if you haven't touched a bike for decades. Moreover, the more consistent and repeated the action, the better the memory retention, such as swimming, is the same stroke over and over again.[4]

Playing the piano requires speed and accuracy, and memory begins to disappear soon after stopping practice, and more and more are forgotten as time goes on. Among them, the greater the difference, the more intermittent and the faster the action that needs fine adjustment is forgotten, just like playing basketball, there are few consecutive shots, and there are differences in angle and distance every time. If you don't practice for a period of time, it is easy to throw "three non-stick"[2, 4].

If the action consists of two demands, the forgetting speed of the two may not be consistent. It's like not riding for years, getting on the bus again without falling down, but it may slow down and ride zigzag when turning. One study tested a skiing-like maneuver and found that subjects were able to perform similar maneuvers ten years after they stopped practicing, but with a 32% reduction in amplitude and a 20.4% reduction in frequency.[7]

Although many actions feel like they have not been learned after a period of time, there is no hurry, and the progress rate when learning again will be significantly faster than the initial learning stage, and you can quickly regain the previous level [7].

The left picture shows slow progress when learning, and the right picture shows rapid progress when learning again. The shorter the interruption time, the less forgetting and the faster the recovery.| Reference [4] In addition to the characteristics of the movement itself, accelerated forgetting also includes a small amount of practice at the beginning of learning, an unskilled mastery of the movement, a long time to stop practicing, and interference from other movements (for example, if you play badminton very well, you will play tennis for a month, and then return to the badminton court, and your level will decline)[4, 7].

In short, whether or not you can see immediate progress in learning a movement, the nervous system will silently improve during practice and store the memory. Even if you haven't practiced for a long time, you can retrieve the previous movement memory when you recall it, fast or slow.

references

[1] Krakauer JW, Hadjiosif AM, Xu J, Wong AL, Haith AM. Motor Learning [published correction appears in Compr Physiol. 2019 Jun 12;9(3):1279]. Compr Physiol. 2019;9(2):613-663.

[2] Park SW, Dijkstra TM, Sternad D. Learning to never forget-time scales and specificity of long-term memory of a motor skill. Front Comput Neurosci. 2013;7:111.

[3] Kantak SS, Winstein CJ. Learning-performance distinction and memory processes for motor skills: a focused review and perspective. Behav Brain Res. 2012;228(1):219-231.

[4] Richard A. Schmidt, Timothy D. Lee, Carolee J. Winstein, Gabriele Wulf, Howard N. Zelaznik. 2019. Motor control and learning : a behavioral emphasis. Sixth edition. USA. Human Kinetics.

[5]Hu Mingxia. 2017. Motion control and motion learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[6] Papale AE, Hooks BM. Circuit changes in motor cortex during motor skill learning. Neuroscience. 2018;368:283-297.

[7] Nourrit-Lucas D, Zelic G, Deschamps T, Hilpron M, Delignières D. Persistent coordination patterns in a complex task after 10 years delay: subtitle: how validate the old saying "once you have learned how to ride a bicycle, you never forget! ". Hum Mov Sci. 2013;32(6):1365-1378.

[8] Teulier C, Delignières D. The nature of the transition between novice and skilled coordination during learning to swing. Hum Mov Sci. 2007;26(3):376-392.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Fruit Shell (ID: Guokr42), Author: Dai Tianyi, Editor: odette

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