To be able to deliver a speech successfully, most professional speakers would agree that you need to internalize it, to know it thoroughly, to know it well enough that it is in your ‘muscle memory’.  We don’t often define the phrase, muscle memory, but we all most likely have some sense of what it means.  It means, at least, that your gestures and words are seamlessly coordinated.  It means, perhaps, that you know where to pause and look at the audience, waiting for a reaction that you know will come.  It means, maybe, that you know exactly the right timing for a killer story that you open with, so that the audience is on board every time.

So where exactly are those ‘muscles’ that have the ‘memory’ to deliver the speech so well?  Most of us would start with the brain – that’s where we think of memory residing for the most part.  Those of us who have learned something about neuroscience will know that we have more neurons in our guts than a cat has in its head – so our guts might be the next place to look for muscle memory.

Now it turns out, according to a fascinating new study, that cells in your kidneys and tendons can remember things as well – and that probably means organs and muscles throughout your body have the capacity to learn and remember basic things.  ‘Muscle memory’ is a much more accurate term than perhaps we had imagined.  Ultimately it seems likely that it will turn out that all our cells can learn and remember.  Our bodies are learning and memory machines.  It’s not just muscle memory – it’s organ memory, tendon memory, and cell memory.

Those who have been keeping up with neuroscience, again, know that we embody our intentions before they reach our conscious minds, so all those cells are way ahead of the storage in our brains – it’s where learning happens first.

So what does this more nuanced view of learning and remembering mean for complicated activities that we want to go well, such as public speaking, where the stakes are high and mistakes less than desirable?

At the very least, it suggests that one common form of practice many speakers engage in is wholly inadequate.  Over the years, when I’ve asked speakers if they’ve rehearsed a speech we are working on, many will tell me that they didn’t have time to rehearse the speech out loud, standing up, walking around, for example, in their hotel rooms.  Instead, they say, they ran through it ‘in their head’.

Just how inadequate that form of rehearsal is can now be revealed in all its glory.  Now we know that your pancreas, liver, and long muscle fibers were all – metaphorically speaking – standing around waiting for their moments, which never came.

Your whole body can learn, remember, and help you when your big moment on stage arrives.  Don’t deprive all those other cells in your body their chance to support your brain.  As the lead researcher, Dr Nikolay V. Kukushkin, says, “we will need to treat our body more like the brain.”

When you are preparing your next speech this year. Involve your whole body.  It’s going to remember whatever you’ve done– or haven’t done — so prepare it to help you succeed.