Reddit reviews The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown.

>But how are these 'memories' stored?

It's a similar system to how myelin works. There's a great book on the practical application of that called "The Talent Code" here:

https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown-dp-0099519852/dp/0099519852

The basic idea is:

1. Talent begins with ability. If you are in a wheelchair, you cannot run a marathon with your legs, because you do not have the ability to do so. So ability is the first gate.
   
2. That is followed by "download speed". Some people pick up certain topics super-fast & we call them "talented" because they can get good at playing the guitar or doing human flagpoles or math really quickly. This doesn't really matter all that much in the long-term, however, because there are plenty of extremely talented people who never get disciplined enough to get good at their particular skill; many talented people are beaten out by less talented people who are harder workers. Again, talent is the ability to do something; if you have a natural aptitude in one particular area & combine that with hard work, then that's a hard combination to beat. That's why you get people like Michael Jordan, who are crazy-amazing because they've got the ability & have put in the time to master their craft & are amazing at what they do!
   
3. Next is potential: how far can you personally go? Are you world-record material? Can you beat your personal records? There are limits to everything, such as running a mile.
   
4. Next is followed by interest & effort. Putting work into getting good at anything requires a lot of boring hours put in over time, so for the most part, it helps to really love what you're doing so that you'll be willing to slog through the hard parts. Not because most things are overly difficult, but because they are boring. That's why a lot of us use music for our daily BWF & cardio & strength-training routines...work is work, and it takes dedicated time & effort to get better at stuff using work. There's a great video on that called Grit.
   
5. Whenever you do something new, you create a new "circuit" in your brain. The more you do it, the bigger & faster that circuit gets. That circuit is called myelin. It's basically like floss that wraps around neural circuits...the more you do a specific activity, the more that floss wraps around, which makes the signal both faster & more accurate. That's why you can tie your shoes without thinking about it in seconds, instead of having to struggle with it like you did when you first started as a kid. People like world-class pianists have huge clumps of myelin in their brain, because they've put in thousands & thousands of hours into practicing & building those physical "circuits" in their brains.
   
   So the formula goes like this:
   
   
6. Talent x effort = skill
   
7. Effort x skill = achievement
   
   It's no different in the world of BWF, especially given how muscle memory works: lose weight, build up some endurance & strength, and then start mastering the moves. On a tangent, did you ever see that fake Conor McGregor on Youtube? Dude cracks me up!
   
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-srTvXH5bo
   
   That guy obviously put in a lot of time into mastering different BWF moves. Or in other words:
   
   
8. He had the ability to do so
   
9. He made the effort to do so (got in shape, mastered the moves)
   
10. He then achieved mastery of those moves & was able to show them off as a result
    
    It's also important to understand what muscle memory means when talked about from a biologist's perspective versus a neuroscientist's perspective:
    
    https://www.popsci.com/what-is-muscle-memory
    
    Basically, what they're finding out right now is that muscles seem to work a bit like myelin in the brain. Per that article, the current working theory is that even as muscles shrink, the muscle cells stick around. In myelin terms, that's why things like addiction are so difficult...you've created a literal, physical pathway for that action, whether it's smoking or drinking or doing drugs, which is partially why it's so easy to fall back into those behaviors...you have a high-speed bullet-train in your brain, ready to whisk you off into those actions at a moment's notice, which is why you have to replace that behavior with something else, which essentially acts as a fork in the road to allow the new behavior to become default, because the old behavior will always exist, physically, in your brain, as myelin.
    
    Part of what they're thinking now for muscles is that your myonuclei partially contributes to "remembering" what you've done in the past, which means that if you bother to put in the effort now to learn new moves & to master good form, that's only going to benefit you further down the road!

Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-Separates-World-Class-Performers/dp/1591842948

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown/dp/0099519852

Outliers: The Story of Success https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930