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?
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Memory is stored in different places in your brain with different properties. When you think about “remembering” something, those memories get run through your cerebral cortex (the “logic” part of your brain). Your cortex is extremely flexible (you can “change your mind” with little effort) and can remember just about anything. But it’s comparatively slow. Far too slow for things like riding a bike. Neuroscience calls this *explicit memory*.
But the *rest* of your brain has memory too (because *that’s what brain cells do*). These other systems are much faster because they’re each dedicated to a specific purpose, they only “learn” when they have to, and they’re only as accurate and flexible as they need to be. They also generally take a lot of repetition to train or un-train, and will often only allow training under the right conditions, like when you feel frustrated. And their memory is entirely separate from the memory you normally think about. Science likes to call this *implicit memory*.
You still remember how to ride a bike because your motor systems were never given a reason to forget. They only change when they have to, which helps them be fast.
If you try to “think about” riding a bike, you won’t get anywhere useful. The relevant memory is attached to your motor systems, which your cortex can’t access. In fact, you can “overthink” riding a bike, which basically means attempting to use your cortex’s memory to override your motor system’s memory, giving your hands and feet very specific instructions which will almost certainly be wrong. The advice “don’t think about it, just do it” really means “the information is in your *implicit* memory, leave your thoughts out of it.”
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