Zaineb Bouhlal, the CPA’s Membership Database and Services Administrator, says she has forgotten how to ride a bike. Is such a thing possible? After all, it’s the most-clichéd thing we’re all supposed to remember as long as we live. “Like riding a bike” is the phrase used to describe most everything we store in our procedural memory. Biking, swimming, typing, driving a car, any skill that involves sensory-motor coordination that we’ve practiced and acquired is one we can re-gain if we’re put back into that same setting.

Dr. Elena Antoniadis is a psychology professor at Red Deer Polytechnic and an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary. She says,

“Once you’ve learned to drive a car it would be very difficult to forget how to carry out all the operations that go into driving a car. But it’s not a memory that our conscious or declarative systems have access to. So, for example, we can’t tell a younger sibling how to ride a bike – it’s not something we can write a manual for. It’s something that the body registers, and then the implicit memory system builds the memory of that skill.”

There are memories that are encoded explicitly – like facts, knowledge, the things you learn in school. You are making a conscious decision to remember those things, and what makes a memory “explicit” is that we can consciously access it and describe its contents, rather than simply showing it through behaviour. Then there are memories that are encoded implicitly – this is how we build habits, conditioned reflexes, and learned responses. The brain registers patterns without us being aware of them. The basal ganglia in the brain helps us build the skills, the habits, and the automatic responses that come from the implicit encoding of memories. Language is often one of those areas that we learn implicitly from a young age.

Before I worked at the CPA, I worked at The Dementia Society of Ottawa & Renfrew County (DSORC). DSORC runs programs for people living with dementia, programs which often make use of deeply encoded memories to recall songs from childhood, or to move and exercise in familiar ways. When I was there we had an Arabic-language program, for people who had grown up in the Middle East but now lived in the Ottawa area. One older man came to that program with his family. They had come to Canada from Saudi Arabia a decade prior, and now their father was living with dementia. Unfortunately, the program wasn’t working very well for him because, although he had spoken Arabic with his family for his entire life, he no longer spoke the language. Instead, he was speaking a language they had never heard before. After a while, the Dementia Care Coaches determined that he was speaking Farsi. He had grown up in Iran, but had never told anyone in his family about his childhood in another country. Now that he was losing his short-term memory, and his longer-term memory was starting to fragment, he was left only with those memories that had been deeply and implicitly encoded in him some 75 years ago.

By contrast, memories that have been explicitly encoded behave differently. We use different methods to retrieve them, and our methods change over time as we experience more of the world from a personal perspective. Says Dr. Antoniadis,

“Children are more emotionally attuned to those around them, their environment, and their primary caregivers. They rely more on the emotional parts of the experience to build their memories. As we age we can rely more on our own lived experiences, the episodes that take place in our lives. I witness this in my own classes. I see mature students who are returning to school, and they can connect something factual with something they’ve experienced in the workplace or in a familial environment. Because they have a broader repertoire of meaningful experiences they can connect with the information they’re receiving.”

That increase in experiences can be a little bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to memory. Think of major events that happened in your life, and the way you remember them now. For me, a good example is 9/11. I know I was in radio school, and that I was with Vicky McKenzie. But when I discuss that moment with Vicky today, we have very different recollections of how we responded, who was around, and what we did next. Either one of us is right and the other wrong or, more likely, we’re both a little bit wrong.

A major event like that one feels like it happens in an instant, and that we have a snapshot in our minds that will be accurate forever. But it doesn’t really happen in an instant. After the event, there is news coverage of it. Your family is going to be talking about it, your co-workers or fellow students or schoolyard friends will also be talking about it. Now, within a few months of the event, you have added untold amounts of information to that first memory, which can distort your recollection of the specific facts.

I am almost certain that we watched, in real time, the second plane hit the World Trade Centre. Vicky says we started watching only after that happened. I remember going, later that afternoon, to donate blood with Jamie Johnston. Partly because we didn’t really know what else to do, and partly to put on our journalist hats to talk to people who were also doing the only thing they could think of in that moment. Jamie tells me we actually did that several days later. Dr. Antoniadis says this is quite common.

“Many times we have factual information about an occurrence. That information comes in separate from the memory itself, but becomes integrated into the memory. This is the reason why sometimes police officers who arrive at an accident or something like that will separate witnesses to make sure their stories don’t impact the other person’s recollection. Hearing another witness describe what they saw can become integrated into our own memory of the event, even one that happened moments earlier.”

In 1994, Chuck Knoblauch of the Minnesota Twins finished the major league baseball season with 45 doubles. That season was shortened by a strike that resulted in no World Series being played, much to the chagrin of Expos fans who thought they had a great chance at their first title, and Blue Jays fans who were denied a chance at a three-peat. Had the season lasted a full 162 games, Knoblauch was on pace to hit 65 doubles and threaten the all-time record of 67 set by Earl Webb in 1931 with the Red Sox.

This is a fact I know. It’s one that has stuck in my brain since my youth, and while there’s no good reason for me to remember, I have never forgotten what might have been in 1994. I find it somewhat interesting. My wife finds it somewhat irritating. “You can remember how many doubles Chuck Knoblauch hit in 1994, but can’t remember that you were supposed to take the garbage out?” she’ll say. And I will respond with “I dunno – that’s just how my brain works, I guess”.

It turns out though, that this is how all of our brains work! Our capacity for short-term memory is finite, but our long-term memory retention is – as far as we know – limitless. Dr. Antoniadis explains more.

“Short-term memory has limited space, but long-term memory is limitless in its storage capacity. We have variety in the mental operations we perform – encoding, storage, and retrieval. But we also have variety in the types of information that we create. Long-term memory is, according to the scientific literature, limitless. We can continuously keep learning and acquiring new information.”

Dr. Antoniadis says that because our short-term memory has a finite capacity, there can be a bottleneck where we are subconsciously deciding whether to commit information to more long-term retention, and deciding what ideas we might discard. I likely won’t need to remember, ten years from now, that I took out the garbage today or shoveled the driveway. It won’t come up in pub trivia. But Shohei Ohtani’s 3-homer 10-strikeout playoff game…that might come up! It’s going in the vault.

So, I’ll remember that for pub trivia purposes, and it may or may not come in handy a decade from now. But what of the people who excel at that kind of memory retrieval? The people like Ken Jennings, Mattea Roach, or Amy Schneider who can get on Jeopardy! and just crush it?

“Retrieval depends heavily on cues and context. Individuals who are practicing retrieval and recollection of accurate information may be using retrieval cues that will help them enhance that. Can they use something about where they were at the time they learned it? What they were doing when it happened? They’re focused on matching the cues that were present when that information was presented. This happens in school too – if you’re writing an exam in the classroom where you learned the information, you’re more likely to be able to retrieve that information than you would be if you wrote it in a different classroom.”

So…does that mean that the old adage is true? The one that says if you study under the influence of weed or alcohol you should write the exam in the same state so you can maintain the same frame of mind and to increase the likelihood that certain cues will assist you in retrieving the information you need? Dr. Antoniadis says yes.

“The concept is supported research findings. It’s called ‘state-dependent memory’. When we’re in a certain state – an emotional state for instance – we’re more likely to retrieve memories from that state. When we’re happy, we retrieve joyous memories. When we’re sad, we’re more likely to recollect sad memories. When our physiological or emotional state matches experiences we’ve had with a similar state, we’re more likely to retrieve the memories from that time.”

We hear a lot about scent and memory in popular culture. Perhaps more than any of our other senses, smell triggers memory cues in subtle ways that make it easier for us to recall old events or retrieve information buried deeply in our minds. Dr. Antoniadis says this is because our olfactory sense (smell) is very much connected with the parts of the brain that houses the instinctual parts of our memories.

“Instead of it being something we are consciously aware of, or something we can explain or articulate, it’s a non-declarative memory. That means it’s something we feel, something we can enact or show through our behaviour, without being able to explain it. We might have an emotional reaction to a frightening cue without being able to explain why we responded that way. Other times, emotional reactions can be the impetus to conjure up the conscious memory if it’s there. It can be a gateway to a conscious recollection of a specific memory.”

A lot of memory exists in a place beyond our specific awareness. When we say we can’t remember something, that doesn’t necessarily mean we haven’t stored the memory, but that we’re having trouble retrieving it. Like thinking we have forgotten how to ride a bike, when in fact we might well remember exactly how to do so when we’re put in a situation that is reminiscent of the time when we did ride a bicycle all the time.

At the CPA, we are going to put this to the test. It will be an anecdotal study, and the data will be applicable only to Zaineb. Once the snow has melted, in late May or early June, and Stewart starts riding his very expensive bike in to work again, we are going to perform an experiment in our parking lot to see if Zaineb can, in fact, summon the bike-riding knowledge she once had when put in that situation. It will be one more experience that we can all add to our repertoire of experiences that allow us to draw on our memories.

Stewart’s bike is very nice, and he takes tremendous care of it. We will wait until the day we conduct the experiment to tell him that his bicycle has been volunteered. So don’t tell him before then.