Muscle Memory Quotes

“The combination of mental and physical practice leads to greater performance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide a physiological explanation. - Alvaro Pascual-Leone”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“Fascia knows where you are in the world; it's loaded with position sensors that contribute to your sense of balance and feeds those bearings directly to that fear-conditioning corner of your brain, the amygdala. Any movement grooved into the fascia feels soothing, gratifying, efficient; try to unlearn it, as any batting coach or ballet teacher will tell you, and you're in for a struggle. New movements, no matter how necessary or logical, just feel wrong.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“I have a friend from my graduate school days at The Ohio State University whom we nicknamed Aladdin. Aladdin and I took a number of Arabic classes together. Every now and then, we would play pick-up basketball at the university gym. Aladdin couldn’t shoot, but he was one of the quickest, most intense defenders I have ever seen. One day, he went high up for a layup at 100 mph, bumped a defender, and fell square on his head. Aladdin lay there motionless for a few minutes before gingerly getting up. He had apparently suffered a concussion. We drove him to the ER, before he decided in the reception that he felt okay enough to go home. I’ll never forget, while we were leaving the gym and during the car ride, Aladdin kept asking people to speak Arabic to him. I probably heard the phrase “Speak Arabic to me, Binyamin! [my Arabic name]” at least two dozen times. Aladdin, in his dizzied and confused state, waiting to be seen for a potentially serious injury, was afraid that he had forgotten Arabic. The next day Aladdin texted everyone saying he felt fine. In hindsight, this story is a comical illustration of every language learner’s worst fear: losing the skills they worked so hard to acquire. As it turns out, Aladdin didn’t forget Arabic and currently lives in Dubai.”
― Benjamin Batarseh, The Art of Learning a Foreign Language: 25 Things I Wish They Told Me

“I joked it must have something to do with the delicate precision of his fingers, honed through his playing, but it was a faint joke. He had too much muscle memory to be anything less than tender and exacting in touching anything that might make music.”
― Valentine Glass, The Temptation of Eden

“It was so freeing to allow her mind and her heart the opportunity to step aside and simply watch her body work.
Better that they keep quiet. She had to listen to them catastrophize all the time. But this moment of tranquility was for her body alone.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon