Encoding using imaginative proprioception, motor movements?

General Memory Chat
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I’ve been experimenting with developing habits by imagining moving my arms.

Let me give an example I love: I want to learn to write with my left hand, perhaps without actually practicing too much in reality.

So the idea is that if I imagine writing words with my left hand, over and over, I’ll actually get good at it. Or if I imagine driving a car, imagine doing laundry, doing chores, I’ll actually get somehow mentally more efficient at doing them.

The idea of imagining motor movements is interesting because of habit-formation. If I make memory palaces, the information from those memory palaces may be there, but they don’t necessary spontaneously come out as a habit. For example, I have some habits, alright this is embarrassing – I twist and play with my hair. That’s a motor habit. It comes out spontaneously. So I thought, you can imagine motor movements to improve life or even pre-plan things. Imagine playing basketball – how you can get into flow predicting the motor movements. I’m thinking it would be good for real-life planning and brain health.

Another thing about imagining motor movements is I heard this thing about PROCEDURAL MEMORY! And the wild thing that I read is that procedural memory can persist in some way that is extremely long – for example, you learn how to tie your shoe, and you will remember how to do that for nearly your whole life. I also read something about Alzheimer’s, something about procedural memory being less affected and staying intact for longer. So that means like, motor movements, that could be super-persistent and help with daily habit forming.

Alright, so this is like a two-for-one topic. I added proprioception in here because it is very interesting and could lead to new ways of efficiently making new memories, and I haven’t seen it discussed here in this forum – or really anywhere

Imagine that I want to memorize a simple symbol or path. Suppose that I want to remember the “&” symbol as if I never saw it before. What I would do, is I would trace my body through the symbol, imagining my body accelerating forward, left, right, back, to accelerate. Think of rollercoasters. You are going to ride a rollercoaster which traces the symbol.

OK, I want to add one more thing to this topic and that is using imitation/empathy/concept of self imagination to remember things more deeply and meaningfully. For example – I come across a tree, and I remember it by imagining myself as what it would feel like to be the tree. Or, I remember a keyboard by imagining myself somehow “being” the keyboard. I feel as though my body is the keys, and looks a certain ways, etc.

What do you guys think? I’m really so curious about this

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Learning by imagining: How mental imagery training aids perceptual learning – ScienceDaily

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Procedural memory is essentially instantiated through sub-cortical structures such as the basal ganglia, in addition to the cerebellum. This tends to be different than semantic memory.

Athletes can often slow down degradation of well developed skills though imaginative rehearsal, so there can be an aspect of mental practice which effects physical skills. However, this cannot take the place of actual bodily rehearsal. If one doesn’t actually involve body movement, I doubt that a person can encode information as procedural memories. As well, procedural memory is not well suited to the encoding and retrieval of semantic memories.

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May I ask, why?

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Procedural memories are considered implicit memories, that is, they are not declarative memories. Declarative memories are those memories that you can declare (tell people about), such as the current president of the US: generally the things for which people use mnemonics.

Implicit memories are memories which you cannot declare. Walking is an implicit memory (I’m pretending walking is a single act). If asked “How do you walk?”, about all one can say is that “I put one foot in front of the other.” While true, it isn’t actually how you walk. Walking requires a great deal of detailed procedural memories (previously stored motor programs). You cannot tell someone anything about your actual motor programs because they are implicit.

Indeed, if one had to re-learn how to walk after an accident say, then one MUST re-learn by doing. I’m sure a person in this situation can very well imagine themselves walking, but that doesn’t help much because imagination cannot build motor programs. These require the body.

Hopefully that isn’t too far off track to be irrelevant!

The main message then, is that the systems involved in implicit memories can hold a great deal of information about bodily movement but that information is unconscious (I just move my arm, I don’t have to recall anything consciously) and so are not really suited to the retrieval of declarative semantic information.

Of course, one does retain some declarative memory about implicit memories. One can tell a person that they must spread their fingers wider to reach the notes on the keyboard, but you can’t tell them how to spread their fingers.

But this is really just imagining which is used a lot in mnemonics, but that isn’t using procedural memory systems to store that bit of information.

Hope that helps, and isn’t too oblique. Sorry about the long post!

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I think this is a great topic. I seem to vaguely recall some threads on memorizing dance, martial arts, or airplane maneuvers–all involving proprioception. If I track them down I’ll report back, but those are some words to search the forum for prior discussions.

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I found a link!

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