Why do we never lose certain skills we have learned, even if we haven’t practiced them for a long time. like for example riding a bicycle, and we lose some, like a new language we learned 10 years ago but can’t remember anything about it now?

Question

Why do we never lose certain skills we have learned, even if we haven’t practiced them for a long time. like for example riding a bicycle, and we lose some, like a new language we learned 10 years ago but can’t remember anything about it now?

In: 5857

Answer 1

I think it depends on how well you learned it to begin with. Memorising some phrases to pass a class is not actually using a language. I moved countries in my teens, I only speak my “mother tongue” a few times a year these days but still know it pretty well .

I’ve read of cases where children were orphaned around 3-5 due to war and were taken out of their country. They never had formal education in their first language and no one spoke it in their adopted families. But in their 20s or 30s when they wanted to reconnect with their roots, they realised that they could actually “re-learn” and became fluent in their original language at a very fast pace, much better than someone who never had experience with the language, despite themselves not using it for decades. (sorry I’m on my phone and about to go to bed actually, I’ll try to find the source tomorrow if I can).

I reckon the same applies to motor skills like riding a bike, the threshold to using a bike is much higher, you can’t just read about it or memorise how the pedals transfer energy to the wheels, you have to actually use the bike and be correct 99% of the time or you will get hurt. If you learnt at a young age and were from a generation/culture where kids are given a lot of independence from a young age, then you would have been riding it for several hours a day, every day for over a decade.

And if you stopped for a few years, you would be a lot more rusty to start cycling again, go a lot slower, wobbly and probably fall a few times.

Note that the saying is also quite old, it will be interesting in a few decades when people do a study on the last few generations whom, in the west at least, grew up in much more protective environment and were not given that much autonomy until after they also learnt to drive. My instinct is that if you only cycled a few times as a kid/teen you will find it much more difficult to get back to it later in life.