That’s the difference between gray matter and white matter. Gray matter readily communicates with it’s crowding neighbors and can retain information, while white matter is myelinated so it can send messages over distances. Gray matter extends from our brains down our spinal cords.
Muscles are dumb meat who take their orders from the nervous system. They have no capacity for memory. But training can create reflexes at the spinal cord level which some refer to as “muscle memory,” except it’s not the muscle that should get the credit here.
I never thought muscle memory was “stored” in the muscles. The same way a memory of a smell is not stored in the nose. I was quite confused to see this as a common misconception but it makes sense from the name
As a massage therapist, unfortunately not only are there massage therapists who have been poorly educated and taught that this is true, but I’ve had countless clients repeat it back to me over the years enough times that I feel the need to attempt to reeducate if I think the person will be receptive to the discussion.
From my experience many people “learn” this because someone well meaning wanted to dumb things down a bit too much and the information wasn’t conveyed very clearly, or there’s practitioners of a variety of flavors that explain how “traumatic experiences are stored in the body’s tissues” and that’s why they have to (insert their brand of therapy.) Another group is surrounding athletes and trainers, who use the term as blurry language and people take them literally as they are then as experts.
It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal until you get a client who thinks that if you hurt them enough with an aggressive massage that it’ll “fix” a past trauma. I wish I were joking.
