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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When I was in college I took French class. I had taken some high school Spanish but I really struggled in the class, I would study but still get barely passing grades. So when my first French test came I studied my butt off. I took the test and breezed through it, all the answers came to me so easily. The next day I went to class and I’d gotten a zero. Every single answer I’d given was in Spanish, a language I can not now or could not then consciously speak. I was allowed to retake the test only because every answer had been the correct word, just the wrong language.
Brains are weird but knowledge is never really gone. It’s just the neural pathway you use to recall and regularly access that info that’s atrophied over time. If you’re further interested, I suggest looking into neuro elasticity. But tldr brains need exercise to be able to do all the amazing things it can do regularly. They’re super adaptive incredible machines, but like any machine theyll back burner or eventually stop unnecessary tasks to conserve load for necessary / more frequently used tasks.
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