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.”
Have you ever tried riding a bike after a long time?
I remember getting on one for the first time after just over a decade and I’ll tell you now it wasn’t just like riding a bike.
I picked it back up fairly quickly but I think it’s the same for any skill we haven’t done in a while.
I was a linguist at one point in my life. It was odd to me that I dreamed fluently. Like really way more fluent than I was. I feel like if I went to the country I was a linguist for, in, whatever, it would take me a year to be fluent again. I currently after 30ish years of not doing that, I’ve forgotten 90 percent of what I once knew
Riding a bike is muscle memory, like walking. It’s a different part of the brain handling it.
Well first off you can’t completely lose a skill. If you speak another language don’t use it for years and then go somewhere where that’s the primary language you’ll eventually pick it back up and you’ll do so faster the second time cause somethings will come back as soon as you jog your memory.
Now why are somethings easier to relearn than others? There’s 2 main reasons.
1. Simplicity. Peddling a bike is A LOT easier than having a conversation in Mandarin (assuming that you haven’t spoken any mandarin in a few years)
2. Muscle memory. Just like your brain can go on autopilot and do a task with some level of success your brain can largely forget how to do something but your muscles remember. A great example of this is swimming. As a kid I went swimming every day in the summer and spring now I don’t swim at all but if I were to jump into that pool right now my arms and legs would be able to tread water and do all kinds of different strokes as if no time had passed at all
There are different regions of the brain based on how we as humans have evolved – the “lizard” basic functions part, the “mammal” emotional part, and the “human” critical-thinking part. When we first learn something, we use our cortex, the critical thinking part of our brain. Physical movements, such as standing, walking, and running, eventually get stored in the cerebellum, which is part of the “lizard” brain. I’m not 100% sure where language goes but I think it stays in cortex, so it can become second nature but we always have to actively think about it, even subconsciously. The cerebellum is pure reflex – shifting balance and walking forward and catching ourselves if we start to trip. We never actively think about it so we don’t forget it.
Riding a bike isn’t natural to our species, so it may never go to the cerebellum and can be forgotten, but if someone does it enough it’s locked in there. Think pro-athletes who just never unlearn their craft.
If this helps: Huntington’s disease affects the cerebellum, which is why those who have it lose their ability to walk/move properly. They have to use their cortex to think about the movements.
Memory is not one homogeneous area in the brain like your computer’s RAM, nor are each memory or set of skills stored & retrieved the same way.
Some skills remembered are more primal or basic than others, and are stored long term and almost automatic – like walking, balancing – the skills that you need to relearn after a brain or physical/spinal injury. They involve the brain and neural pathways through your body. After an injury, some signals may need to learn new pathways if the old ones can’t be mended. Riding a bike, catching a ball, would be just above those skills.
Language is an important skill that requires many senses – aural, visual, and more. As it invokes many different parts of your brain working as one, it can sometimes be triggered by different stimuli.
Sometimes, when higher brain/memory functions fail due to damage or age, they can be actioned via other stimuli like music, or other senses like smell or taste.
And sometimes, when you are old – you just forget!
I think it’s also important to remember that with the language example, it is replaced by the used language. You don’t replace how to ride a bike with some other way to ride a bike and then use it daily. Driving on the right vs left is a better transportation analogy to the language one. If you grew up driving on the right, then move somewhere else that drives on the left – you will catch yourself making ‘right hand driving’ mistakes. Hitting the wipers instead of turn signal, glancing the wrong way first before making a turn, etc. And definitely don’t drink/smoke/be tired and drive at night without other cars about or you might end up like this idiot on the wrong side of the road and not realizing until you reach a stoplight and the lines are on the wrong side of the road. When you are on autopilot or your instincts kick in, you will default to the most used system in your mind.
Born in U.S. raised by German immigrants. Spoke, understood and read German easily. At some point my parents decided they wanted me to speak exclusively English to them to improve their language skills. Stopped speaking German around 10. I have been grasping for that languages ever since. I grew up in a Spanish speaking community in LA. I became an fair Spanish speaker. All the times I have been to Germany I end up speaking sentences 50% German and 50% Spanish. It’s mortifying.
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.
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