Switching Bodies and Muscle Memory

[RandomSimpEvent]

Basically, I'm writing a story where two characters switch bodies. I'll refer to them as Character A and Character B for clarity. Character A is pretty much a normal, everyday dude, while Character B on the other hand is an exceptional fighter with years of experience. After they switch, Character A is obviously going to be much stronger and athletic, since he is in B's body now. What I was wondering, though, is if stuff like reflexes and such would carry over due to muscle memory or something similar. For example, Character A gets into a fight and unconsciously lowers into a proper fighting stance and despite never having fought in his life before. While Character A can obviously not fight anywhere near as well as B would, would some reflexes carry over, or would Character A have to learn everything from scratch?

For anyone wondering, the means by which they switched bodies is supernatural, as in, nothing like brain transplants or the like is involved.

 

[Oochillyo]

hey RandomSimpEvent how are you

Are you planning for them to switch on purpose or accident like they know how switching will affect them or they randomly switch ?

Are their brains swapping two like jumping into a new car (the body)

Its funny I just had an idea similar to this for my story where the guy is 'switched' in time

Reflexives I think nearly all of them dont use the brain they are like instinct to make it easy to understand , e.g if you were about to burn your hand it would take too long even though nerve singles travel at 275mph to send the message to your brain which isnt good enough so your body pretty much just uses the nervous system to jump the process and you pull back your hand.

So I think the reflexes will work at the same rate so A is at speed 8 lets say really to simply and B is at speed 6 , when they swap bodies A will be at speed 6 and B will be at speed 8

Muscle Memory I saw a Doctor Investigates the Brain and things like muscle memory on T.V. couple months back, the famous English Doctor normally on like that show that researches things like facts about health he has short grey/black hair and square glasses anyway he did that show and what I can remember is learning skills as I knew before is reinforced the more you do it due to connective links between neurons getting stronger and this can carry on throughout your life if you keep practicing though its harder with age, there is like levels two it so lets say 1 is someone learning the skill of backflips on skateboard, he/she is gonna struggle and miss timing fall ect as you practice and build neuron links to the task you sort of go up these levels they say slowly ofcourse and they think at peak level thats how things become instinctive like pro skateboarders who do trick flawless ect and your reactions ect become quicker and you dont have to think about the task you just do it.

So I think the reflexives would be the same just the person operating the body after the swaps would not be used to them.

I think if the brains are moving bodies the person operating the body will have thier same muscle memory ect but it may not be easy to operate their new body until they get used to it things like how quick they are, strong and any new weakness like injuries ect ect

If the brains stay in the body (not sure how that will work with each persons conciseness) but they should struggle with areas or find some things easier it depends on what thier new brain knows and doesnt know, the neuron connections whats already been learned and stored as muscle memory and what thier new body is like as I said before with things like physical speed, weakness and weight for instance.

This reminds me of that famous problem show in Futurama (an explanation of how its solved is here) but for your story you have to think about what happens next after they swap bodies and mayby brains.

A/A B/B -> A/B B/A

Hope I have helped sorry if its confusing

I really enjoyed thinking about this very cool topic and idea for your story

Good Luck with your story buddie hugs

Regards - Declan Sargent

 

[tinkerdan]

I suspect it would be a bit of work on both sides; because they each would be in a body they don't necessarily trust and they might seem a bit robotic at times where they concentrate too much on the tasks at hand while finding out what they can trust.

It might be similar to someone living alone for a long time and then taking on a boarder that has access to most of the rooms in the house. Now every so often something has been moved and you start finding yourself reaching for something without looking and you miss.

Or more sinister, someone you live with starts rearranging things. I spent a whole morning trying to figure out why I was suddenly so clumsy that I kept spilling my coffee until it turned out that my elbow was hitting a sofa that had been move six inches closer to table where my coffee cup was sitting.

Lastly; you'll get a better idea of this type of thing as you get closer to my age; some mornings I can't trust my instinctual movements because I keep sweeping things off the sink into the toilet.(First thing in morning be certain toilet seat is down.)

 

[Biskit]

If you want to make this "realistic", the way brain and body interact is complex and gives you pretty much total freedom to twist it to suit your story.

If you want the crash course in modern understanding of the brain then my recommendation is a superb documentary "The Brain" by David Eagleman. The Brain With David Eagleman [DVD] [2015] [Region 1] [NTSC]: Amazon.co.uk: Eagleman, David: DVD & Blu-ray
I still adore the experiment to test how our perceptions change under stress - pushing volunteers of the top of a tower to drop into a safety net to see what they remember from the fall.

The highlights, for the purpose of body swapping, as best I recall:
Muscle memory - no such thing. What we call muscle memory is the brain, and it's all done "in the background" with no conscious thought and requires training. Just standing still requires an ongoing sequence of tiny muscle movements that "just happens" once you've done the whole learning to walk etc as a baby.
Most of what we do is not done consciously. Problems/decisions are only passed to our "conscious self" when all that background automation can't cope.

@Oochillyo made a point about reflexes, but again so far as I recall those are handled by the brain, but it lurks in the back of my mind that some of those things like withdrawing from something hot are handled somewhere down in the brainstem, but they still need all that well-trained automation to move your hand etc. Afterwards it gets passed to the "conscious self" to scream ##### that's hot.

So, how you choose to do your body-swap will have a big impact. If you somehow leave all the underlying automation in place and just move the "conscious self" then when your character moves into a new body, all the skills will be still there. This does assume that those different aspects are physically separate in the brain, which might well be false. If the underlying automation gets overwritten, or scrambled, by the incoming mind the most likely outcome is that on moving into a new body the first thing your character will do is fall flat on their face until the brain re-learns standing, walking etc. The best you can hope for is that your character will be incredibly clumsy, struggle to speak, and generally be useless for several chapters.

The other thing to keep in mind is what the experts refer to as "plasticity" - the ability of the brain to adapt and change, which is what makes it possible for people recovering from things like strokes to regain skills that were lost. A few years ago my father started talking about being injured whilst serving in the army. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and was talking about (possibly for the first time in 60 years) "the woman who taught arts and crafts to people learning how to use their hands again". Neither myself nor my sister had any inkling that Dad had to re-learn how to walk, talk and coordinate his hands.

 

[Oochillyo]

The human body as well as the brain is very adaptable, there is a guy who practiced being in cold water for years and now can be nearly fully unclothed and be fine in arctic waters, in the show I was watching about the Brain and how we develop from before birth through our lives one person was a Ballerina starting out and her feet ache, she gets blisters on them ect ect but her body eventually numbs out the pain, her feet and calf muscles get stronger basically her body over time has adapted her to be a Ballerina which is a very demanding profession on the body and this is the same for the brain as @Biskit said your brain has plasticity to learn new information, improve current skills ect ect even if you lose some of your brain to disease or injury the other areas will adapt and take that role but that is harder to achieve with age but not impossible.

It was though when we are adults the brain sort of lock in all the neurons and doesnt make new ones as such you struggle to learn things as quickly as you could has a baby, child and even teen, the element of you struggling to learn new skills as you get older is true thats why as I said its harder to learn a language as you get older and your asking the brain to invest a lot of neurons to learn that new skill, however Science has found out your brain is still Pliable even as your older, if you practice enough you can learn new skills and build current ones, what you know and how much you can know after you become and adult is not fixed in stone, yes harder but not impossible which is great and learning new skills ect even when your an adult or and older adult is still great for your brain and can keep the mind sharp which may help stop or slow diseases such as dementia

In fact if babies are detected with epilepsy early on sometimes the Doctors operate on the brain and take out half the brain physically half the brain, if this is done when the baby is 3 months or so old this can be ok as the brain hasnt made enough neuron connections to pose a risk, if all goes well the brain will adapt and the person can live a normal life even with half a brain, so in your story you dont have to tell the reader or show the reader straight away but you can make it clear at some point that the brain's our persons are slowly adapting to thier new bodies and getting to grips with the new skills ect.

Regards - Declan Sargent

 

[Venusian Broon]

This really depends on how you 'perform' the transfer.

Personally I'd think it would be incredibly janky and both people would suffer from all sorts of problems, like alien hand syndrome, lost or mingled memories and other weird effects. They would also probably have to have serious rehabilitation for a long time period to re-learn how to do all sorts of simple things.

Why?

Because I'm assuming that the mind, including all memories and consciousness, is generated by the hardware, namely the neurons and the weightings they have developed over time. But surely every brain is different, with different numbers of neurons, connected, likely on the cellular level, in unique patterns; patterns that the individual built up with their own unique experiences.

So what happens when you transfer the hardware state of one person into another? What if the other person had fewer neurons. Does the process add new ones? Does it go through all 100 trillion or so connections in the second person and make sure they are identical to the first person? What if it can't? What if the new host has more neurons - are they destroyed or deactiveated? Or would they 'bleed' through and interact with the new brain? What if the new neurons of the second person operate differently, because of genetics or disease?

Then are you also replacing all the nerve cells in the rest of the body? Because they are also unique to the experiences of the person. If you just replace the 'brain' then it will very likely not give the correct signals to these systems and therefore the rest of the body to accurately control movements. (And also the bodies will be different so you'll have to get used to that anyway.)

You might end up with someone in a 'baby' state requiring a great deal of help to do everything!

But....maybe you have a different model on how this transfer is actually made, that makes the above all moot.

EDIT: I thought about actual Brain transfer a.k.a. Frankenstein...but note that you've ruled that out! If it's supernatural than I suppose anything goes and all of the above is completely irrelevant

 

[Wayne Mack]

As the author, I think you have as much flexibility as you want in a mind transfer. At one extreme, the transfer could be only a limited set of conscious memories; this often leads to identifying the switched bodies through some obscure, long ago fact. At the other, the inhabitant of the different body may not be able to understand the nerve signals being received; after the transfer, the person would essentially be a newborn and need to relearn how to interpret senses and control muscles. Another consideration is that if the bodies are of different sizes, then eye-hand coordination may be thrown off.

If the writer is able to convince the reader that mind transfer is possible, then the writer should also be able to set whatever parameters he or she desires on the result.

 

[Danny McG]

Read Altered Carbon, good insight on this issue

 

[hitmouse]

Since this is fiction you can do what you want as long as you make it sound plausible and engaging. The Jumanji remake had an amusing take on this theme.

 

[Aquilonian]

In my own books this happens quite a lot, I had it that after a soul exchange the person acquired the motor skills of the new body but retained their own original memories clearly along with vaguer memory traces from the body's previous owner. I found this theme the hardest bits to write about, although I did find it interesting. As regards making it plausible to the reader I think this will depend less on the practical details and more on how you convey the characters' experience and the emotional reactions this creates in each of them. I'm thinking that if the swap happened in a violent setting then former everyday dude wouldn't have time to think too much and would just find himself responding instinctively with the fighter's motor skills, but afterwards there'd be a big contrast with his own memory and attitudes from a life in which he'd presumably avoided violence until now.

From my own experience I'm sure there is such a thing as muscle memory and skin memory for that matter. Not just memory either, look at cases of the stigmata in Catholic saints. Reductionist materialist science would have a problem explaining that one.