Never saw myself starting a topic in the ‘pub’, but this is quite interesting and I guess it’s the place for it…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15791973
Why should musical memory be stored in the brain at all? We play by virtue of practice - most of us. The memory is in the muscle.
Er … no. So-called ‘muscle memory’ is just one type of memory stored in the brain. The muscles themselves don’t remember.
It has been interesting reading about the role music is playing in helping US Representative Gifford recover her speech after her wounding last January.
It is true some folks have muscles for brains, I haven’t heard of any who were also musically inclined.
That’s the current approved thinking. I disagree. All kinds of mobile substances have some kind of memory, in very primitive ways. Why does the memory of the movements we make have to be in the brain at all? I firmly believe that some of the memory is in the limbs themselves.
Ah. OK. A matter of faith then.
So you think Clive Wearing’s muscles can remember how to read music he’s never seen? 
According to an article in ‘New Scientist’, an institution in America is studying a surprising thing- apparently, some of the nervous tissue in the heart is made up of, and connected to, the same sort of nerve cells as are in the- I think- amygdala- well, a part of the brain connected with expressing emotion. When something truly horrible has happened, I’ve felt emotional pain, physically, in the heart…
So maybe the locomotive nervous system isn’t as simple as they think, and some memory is stored in the neurons associated with the muscles. It seems that in brain science, they keep reveiwing and ‘proving’ with hard evidence stuff that is subjectively fairly obvious, all the time. Same as in animal behaviourology, durrr..animals aren’t thick- durrr- and social anthropology-durrrr. Neanderthal man wasn’t thick. Durrr.
(I bet he played the flute, too. Probably remembering it in the muscles)
Muscles certainly develop proficiency at specific tasks through use but the memory is retained in the brain until an autoimmune disease of some type begins killing off some or/all the various upper and/or lower motor neurons slowly but surely.
Muscle memory, hmmmm? That’s an interesting topic to me personally. I’ve been a musician all my life. I started playing at an early age. I was a performing multi-instrumentalist by my early twenties. When I was in my early forties I came down with a neurological autoimmune disease that left me paralyzed from the neck down. I did recover from the disease but I had to re-learn all of the instruments all over again. My brain knew exactly what to do to play the instruments. My brain had not changed, the muscles had not changed (much) but the peripheral nervous system that connected them had been shorted out. Once the nerve system had healed it was like starting over again. I had to learn how to walk, etc. After relearning the basics I had to develop all of the tactile aspects of playing each instrument all over again. It was a tedious process and took some time although not as much time as learning each instrument had taken in my youth. So my personal takeaway is that the complete neuro-muscular system allows us to do what we do.
The Mayo Clinic doctors I worked with during and after my hospitalization were not at all interested in what they could learn from my musical recalibration experience either.
Feadoggie
Or you could call it scepticism. 
My neighbor had a stroke in August. Only on Sunday did he finally know my name. His memory is slowly coming back to him. He still has no memory of his life but he did recognize his sisters. When I was talking to him about California, where he lived for a good portion of his life, he told me that he doesn’t remember “Southern California”. He doesn’t have any of the classic symptoms of someone who had a stroke. He doesn’t mind in the least that his memory is gone. His personality is intact.
An amazing story, Feadoggie. No way can I imagine what you went through. And I must say I’m surprised and disappointed that the Mayo physicians would ignore a learning opportunity like that.
Once I was stable and the immune reaction was suppressed they largely declared victory. I have no complaints about how they treated me. It was pretty much a miracle what they were able to do anyway. Timing and place was everything in my case. I showed up in the hospital while they were proposing/researching new treatments for several autoimmune diseases. They used a then radical treatment on me to stop the immune response, plasmapheresis, which has since become standard practice to treat many autoimmune reactions. That was their interest at the time and their research focus. I was just fortunate to become part of that and to have a successful outcome.
I did have a few long discussions with the Mayo neurologist and psychologist on what they expected I would experience once I got back to playing music. Things didn’t go quite as they described. But they only followed up for a year after leaving the hospital and I was a long way from being able to play well at that point. The most memorable part of the recovery was that my wife and I had a young son at the time and he and I learned to walk together. I’m not sure many fathers can share that with their kid. So my thoughts about muscle memory changed a bit after that experience. It is a pretty complex network of biological structure and electro-chemical reactions that add up to simple movements.
The amnesia article was quite thought provoking.
Feadoggie