a little info on muscle memory

This is the bad thing about writing your blog the next day because after sleeping everything you did yesterday sort of feels like a dream. 

I remember back when I used to be really dedicated on Nitrotype and would type like 200 races in one sitting LOL. So I revisited it yesterday and typed 119 WPM first try which is amazing since my highest ever is only 127 WPM. The way they calculate WPM or words per minute is that they average every word to be 5 characters so it's just (the number of characters you type in a minute)/5. So if I got 127 words per minute that means I type 635 characters in a minute or 10.6 characters every second. That's insane. But the thing is, when you're typing, you rarely focus on what the next letter is going to be but rather your brain already knows certain patterns that are common and executes those patterns instead of letter by letter. 

Now, this leads to my next topic, muscle memory!! So I did do some research and I watched a few videos on people explaining it. The first video was a guy talking about how it applies to playing the piano. Basically, the term muscle memory itself is a bit misleading since muscles themselves do not have memory. Instead, a part of your brain called the cerebellum allows you to control your motor skills to complete complex tasks such as playing a sonata for example. Over time, after 300-500 repetitions of the same thing, your brain gets accustomed to the particular sequence of muscle control required to do the task and it stores it somewhere so it can be fetched with ease at a later date. This is also the reason why learning how to ride a bike takes less time than learning how to play a sonata from memory since 500 repetitions of cycling take way less time than playing a complicated piece 500 times. 

However, is muscle memory really a good thing when it comes to piano? Well, the answer is yes and no. See, without muscle memory playing a 1-hour concerto would be virtually impossible because you'd have to memorize every single note and the order in which every single key is played. A tiny distraction like a cough in the audience or a flash from a camera could be enough to completely throw you off and make you mess up. That's where muscle memory kicks in. It ALLOWS up to a certain degree of distraction and even your hands play by themselves the correct notes like a machine pre-programmed to do so. Albeit muscle memory is awesome in that sense, it would be a mistake to completely rely upon it. You still need to keep a part of your brain focused on where in the piece you currently are because if you don't even know that much then you could very easily skip past half of the piece and go straight to the ending or somehow loop back to the very beginning. Aaaand I won't deny that it's happened to me before but at least not in public LOL. 

Lastly, since muscle memory is used to build these programmed sequences of motions, you can build really good habits but also cement bad ones after enough repetitions. That's why it's extremely important to correct what you're doing wrong before it becomes a habit. Okay, that's all I have for you today. Seems like today was more of a lecture than an update on my life post but I enjoyed it LOL. cyaaa