If you learned to ride a bike as a kid, at some point you probably left the bike in the garage for months or years before coming back to it.
And though you might have been a little wobbly when you finally decided to climb back on, you never had to go through that training wheel phase that you did at the start.
The feeling is so familiar, it's become a figure of speech.
When something's easy to remember after a long time not doing it, you say it's "like riding a bike." But this kind of memory really does stand apart from other kinds.
Even when people suffer memory loss, memories of how to do things often survive.
So why is riding a bike, just like riding a bike?
Motor memories get stored differently than lots of other memories, making them harder to lose — but like other memories, there's still a lot we don't know.
Motor memory is the ability to repeat motions and remember motor skills.
It's part of a category of memories called implicit memories, which are generally things you learn less by thinking and more by doing.
And when you learn things without putting in specific effort to learn them, weird things can happen.
