That's exactly it. It's not your fingers that know, it's your brain, just not the conscious function.Crochet is that way for me, and sometimes, work.
Sometimes I can't think of the right move - if I stop thinking and just let my fingers decide, they make the right choice. I suspect that, like music, it wouldn't work for something new, but if the fingers 'know' the correct choice from past training, they simply follow the pattern.
*My work is traditional 'paper-shuffling', put forms in the right one of a dozen slots. Once I learned them, my fingers could do the walking, if the brain got sidetracked.
And there are more than one of these parallel brain functions that simply work outside of the conscious part of your brain. It gives one a different perspective on just what consciousness is.
People with certain kinds of brain damage can do things one would normally think required one's consciousness to achieve. In their case, they cannot see or think of the thing, like the angle of the slit*. But the brain sees that angle and the hand can find the angle all without the person having conscious awareness of the angle the hand is in.
So there may be one mechanism that involves trained movements, but there is another that does not require previous habituation.
*It's weird when they can see the slit but not the angle. It's not like a blind spot, there is some kind of shape blindness. That's a whole topic in itself.
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