It reminded me of this quote by artist and teacher Howard Ikemoto: “When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her that I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forgot?”
In the race to become more mature, we forget the little things we enjoyed learning when we were younger. It’s not just how to draw—it could be to dance or to build new things or to play sports. We can reclaim them, but let’s start with a question: did we really forget?
You’ve probably forgotten what your first day of school was like or what year the French Revolution started. These things fall under your declarative memory—facts, events, and experiences you need to consciously recall.
But you probably never forgot how to ride a bike.
Riding a bike falls under procedural memory. It’s the part of your memory responsible for performance.
One study from the 1950s observed a man named Henry Gustav Molaison, who had to have large parts of his brain removed as a potential treatment for epilepsy. Scientists found that he had lost much of his ability to form memories.
They asked him everyday to draw a star on a sheet of paper while only looking at a reference and his hand in a mirror (this reversed the image). Molaison never remembered performing the task. But his hand–eye coordination skills improved over the several days.
In other words, though his declarative memory remained poor, he was able to develop new procedural memories.
Simple sequences of movements are far more ingrained in our minds than specific events. Whether it’s riding a bike or drawing, we likely never forgot.
So, why does our brain resist?
At some point, you probably stopped doing that thing you loved to do when you were a kid.
This is because we got stuck in one part of the learning cycle. As educational theorist David Kolb describes, there are four steps to learning.
