Random muscle twitches--WTF?

Okay–for nearly two days, a muscle on my left shoulder (under the armpit) has been freaking out. It isn’t painful, just aggravating–a twitchy, almost vibrating kind of thing that leasts just a few seconds. It is only when I’m at rest, and happens a few times an hour.

I’m not concerned about it as these types of odd muscles spasms are not unusual. When I’m really, really tired, my lower left eyelid will do the same thing–twitch twitch for a few seconds, then stop. After a few days of catching up on rest, it returns to normal.

I’m just curious what the mechanics are for such a random body event–what is going on when suddenly it seems necessary for THIS muscle to freak out for a few days? I get this image of a short-circuit that my body is trying to repair.

Argh! There it goes again. Annoying little bugger.

Just shamelessly resurrecting my own thread. It got to page 2 with no replies, dagnabbit.

[sub]sniff NO ONE LOVES ME!

Actually…uh…NO ONE KNOWS MY ANSWER![/sub]

Don’t know the answer, but I share your distaste for them. I’ve always had muscle twitches when I was really tired, but about 3 years ago I suffered some spinal cord damage (brachial plexus dysfunction, they called it, and no one seemed to know the cause) which resulted in partial numbness and tingling in my hands, arms, and torso, more or less permanent, according to my neurologists. Since then I get them a lot more. Sometimes it’s a painful, hard cramp; sometimes it’s just an annoying twitch that goes on for days. I had just started a thread asking about it when the board crashed last year.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had my hand on the mouse and involuntarily clicked something because my first finger spazzed out. It’s even more annoying when it’s a bigger muscle–biceps or pecs. Not that mine are huge, but you know what I mean.

I get them when a muscle is tired or has had a shot of adrenalin. Course, mine’s cause I’ve got extremely mild cerebal palsy thanks to a forceps delivery when I was born. So I doubt that helps :slight_smile:

I don’t know, either; however, the mechanics for any muscle movement would have to involve neural signals and the chemical ions responsible for the electrical stimulation pathway: sodium and potassium, along with calcium for muscular contraction. There may be several reasons. Random neural stimulation can occur when the neural pathway is fatigued or when you are stressed, your brain may send out a signal due to some false receptor message, etc.