Heck, touch-typing is so ingrained in my brain that I sometimes recall how to type a word to remember how to spell it. For longer words I don't write by hand very often, it's simply easier for me to remember and transliterate the muscle memory.
I once was so high on MDMA that I could barely speak let alone type something because I just could not understand anything. Not only could I not remember my password, I could not keep my eyes steady enough to see the letters on the keyboard.
I had to unlock my laptop to play some music so I just tried to relax and let my fingers do the thing. I did it.
> Motor movements are some of deepest knowledge we have.
Don't know if it's is a real thing, but in some CSI type show years ago there was a witness with amnesia (couldn't remember their name etc.) whose identity they found out by engaging him into a conversation to distract the consciousness from the "I can't remember" thoughts and then put a form in front of him he was supposed to sign (IIRC it could have been a witness statement) and the movement of signing something was so ingrained that it persisted even through the amnesia.
Anyone know if this is a real thing or just fiction?
I can't comment on the specific example of signing a form, but I did read about a case like this in Robert Sapolsky's "Why zebra's don't get ulcers".
It's a famous case in neurology, a man called "H.M."
Here's what's written in the chapter "Stress and memory" about H.M.:
"H.M." had a severe form of epilepsy that was entered in his hippocampus and was resistant to drug treatments available at that time. In a desperate move, a famous neurosurgeon removed a large part of H.M.'s hippocampus, along with much of the surrounding tissue. The seizures mostly abated, and in the aftermath, H.M. was left with a virtually complete inability to turn new short-term memories into long-term ones -- mentally utterly frozen in time.
Zillions of studies of H.M. have been carried out since, and it has slowly become apparent that despite this profound amnesia, H.M. can still learn how to do some things. Give him some mechanical puzzle to master day after day, and he learns to put it together at the same speed as anyone else, while steadfastly denying each time that he has ever seen it before. Hippocampus and explicit memory are shot; the rest of the brain is intact, as is his ability to acquire a procedural memory.
If you ask me, the CSI episode is definitely plausible if you consider that H.M. was real
It is real, not fiction. Oliver Sacks' "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" contains a similar case, read "In the moment, music and amnesia". In one of the Sack's talks on youtube, I heard his hypothesis to account for this phenomenon: not every learning is equal; some learnings are so ingrained, they and these learnings are stored in the lower brain, brainstem area.
Another good example of this is that musicians will often deliberately work to get parts of pieces fully in muscle. For fast sequences, if your brain has to get involved, you've already missed a few notes.
I like watching Prank shows. For some reason its entertaining to see what the body does instantly/unconsciously in response to stimuli when there is no time for thought. Below some threshold its like people have no control over what their legs, hands, face, vocal chords will do...
