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“Muscle memory” is a term commonly used in everyday discourse for the sort of embodied implicit memory that unconsciously helps us perform various motor tasks we have somehow learned through habituation, either through explicit, intentional training or simply as the result of informal, unintentional, or even unconscious learning from repeated prior experience. In scientific terminology, such memory is often designated as “procedural memory” or “motor memory” because it enables us to perform various motor procedures or skills in an automatic or spontaneous fashion, without conscious deliberation of how the procedure should be followed and without any explicit calculation of how one identifies and achieves the various steps involved in the procedure and how one proceeds from step to step. Paradigmatic of such muscle-memory motor skills of performance are walking, swimming, riding a bicycle, tying one's shoes, playing the piano, driving a car, or typing on a keyboard. To be precise, these motor skills should be described as sensorimotor, because they involve coordinating sensory perception with the movement of action. Moreover, because these skills apparently rely on schemata or patterns deeply embedded in an individual's central nervous system, the core engine of memory in so-called muscle memory is not simply the body's muscles but instead also involves the brain's neural networks.

The term “muscle memory” is nonetheless deeply entrenched, perhaps because it serves some key rhetorical functions. Muscle suggests body in contrast to mind, as muscular effort is frequently contrasted to mental effort or as muscle men are typically opposed to men of thought. Because of this common brain/brawn opposition, muscle memory conveys a sense of mindless memory. Such memory is mindless, however, only if we identify mind with mindfulness in the sense of explicit, critically focused consciousness or deliberate, reflective awareness. Procedural or performative tasks of implicit motor memory often require and exhibit significant mental skills and intelligence, as, for example, when a good pianist plays with spontaneity yet also with aesthetically sensitive mindfulness. In demonstrating that intelligent mind extends beyond clear consciousness, muscle memory also makes manifest the mind's embodied nature and the body's crucial role in memory and cognition.