If I were a concert pianist my fingers would know which notes to play as I set out to delight my audience. Not just my fingers, my arms, feet; even my whole body would know when to sway to right or left.
Hours of practice would have been needed to hone this ability, even if I were born with a special piano genius genetic endowment – the figure of 20,000 hours is often quoted for anyone to reach their full genius potential in any branch of learning or performance.
On a more down to earth level, my fingers, my whole body, know how to make a cup of coffee in my own kitchen without having to give it any thought at all; mug, spoon, coffee jar, kettle, all collected & manipulated on automatic pilot. That is until someone helpfully rearranges the cupboards into a more logical order.
Modern research shows that experts actually use their brains less than do mere ordinary mortals; a brain scan for the Radio 4 Vox project showed that the relevant bits of Clare Balding’s brain were far less active when she was in commentating mode than in ordinary conversation.
We think that the brain is intimately involved in directing these things that we do, & it certainly feels like that whenever we have to think about what we are doing.
So practice makes perfect by reducing the need to think? Somehow it is laid down in the memory which just chunters away by itself? No consciousness required in these operations? The brain acts like a monitoring machine, coming into operation & issuing a loud warning only when the system breaks down.
So where is this memory located? Could it be in the concert pianist’s fingers, for example?
This raises the intriguing possibility that cells outside the brain have their own memory. Finger cells do not just remember that they are finger cells. The memory of what they do at the piano must also be heritable by the daughter cell, or else each new cell must learn from the beginning under the direction of the brain – or maybe its neighbour cell in the finger.
But what part of the structure of the cell could contain the memory?
