Brain Lag

Lift the filter jug and swing it over towards the open kettle, tilt it in the appropriate direction and pour enough water into the kettle to make a cup of tea. Simple – or should be. It wasn’t this morning.

Between the initial lift and pouring water into the kettle the jug had to pass the milk carton, either over it or around it, I chose ‘over’.

A tiny misjudgement of the height of the milk carton and how high I had to lift the jug to clear it was the direct cause of an incident.

As I swung it, the bottom of the jug caught the top of the milk carton – whose screw-top had already been unscrewed, removed and placed to one side so that, in the almost immediate future, a dollop of milk could be added to the tea that was about to be made.

I expect you will already have worked out what happened next.

Quickly I put down the filter jug and reached for the tottering milk carton. I caught it. I caught it! Before the tiniest dribble had escaped through the open neck of the carton.

Then the incident occurred.

In my mind.

A clash of two directions of thought.

1. I still have lightning reactions when there is no time for conscious assessment of the requirement.

2. My unconscious conscious judgement of the muscle power required to perform a physical task is inaccurate and, from previous experience of similar occurrences, always on the ‘too little’ side. Too many spilt milk situations.

Upon investigation I learned that the message from the brain to an arm or leg to perform a familiar function is based on what is known as muscle memory, which of course is a misnomer – muscles can’t remember anything, it’s the brain that remembers, and part of what it remembers is the power required for a specific muscle to perform the familiar task.

Now, if there has been a time gap between the last occasion when my brain memorised the muscle power requirement for lifting a filter jug and the current situation, and if I haven’t been maintaining a constant muscle-tone level, my brain might well have sent a message with a power requirement that would have been sufficient for a previous job, but not this one.

Which makes ‘muscle memory’ a double misnomer.

I call it ‘Brain Lag’.

(Of course, this morning, the filter jug might have had more water in it than the time when my brain’s memory of the lifting power requirement was last established.)