I once remarked to the docking pilot how smoothly the operation went leaving Blunt Island Terminal and getting pointed downstream in the St Johns river. He said “Captain, I’ve done that more than (IIRC) 8000 times.”
This means that if someone walks the same path every day — and the path and surrounding conditions remain identical — each walk still activates different “map-making” brain cells, or neurons.
I apologize in advance for nerding out but we’re in my area of interest and that article was cool as hell. For most people, talking about this stuff is the cure for insomnia.
The cool part (to me) is that nerve path signal conduction for memory-making and recall is not a random or completely chaotic process, and also not based on ease, speed of transmission, or distance. There might be an association with ion channel electropotential based on recent use and ion (think fuel) availability. A cell that fires has a latency between shots and a max cap on the firing rate within a timeframe.
Predicting signal paths is a matter of relying on probabilities to create probability fields where the signal is more or less likely to pass. This is the Butterfly Effect and it’s good solid (for chaos math) math… as I wrote, it’s not completely random or chaotic, and we don’t understand it well yet.
Worse, add to this butterfly effect another layer of complexity, but one that might help us with memory processing; parallel association… if you hum a particular song while building a section of a mental map, you use a widely different pathway than you would without music… but having multiple neural inputs in the mental map-making (vision, hearing, parallel memory processing) makes the neural pathway much more predictable during recall.
We’re simply made to filter neural data and improve recall using the filtration.
A great example of this is the use of music or smell to trigger memories, and in brain-damage victims or Alzheimer’s patients, music and singing allows for memory recall long after speech alone becomes ineffective.
So, yeah, put some low music on and tune it out mentally when you want to later repeat an action, pathway or memory guided by memory, and hum the song when you want to recall it. It will boost most people’s results, if their filtering capacity isn’t compromised by autism ADHD or other neurodivergency.
Again, I apologize for putting everyone to sleep.