16 August Today's term from psychology is Procedural Memory.

Procedural memory is a part of the long-term memory that is responsible for knowing how to do things, also known as motor skills. As the name implies, procedural memory stores information on how to perform certain procedures, such as walking, talking, riding a bike, and typing on a keyboard. Implicit memory uses past experiences to remember things without consciously thinking about them. It differs from declarative memory, or explicit memory, which consists of facts and events that can be explicitly stored and consciously recalled.

Professional musicians and professional athletes excel, in part, because of their superior ability to form procedural memories. Such memory is also important in language development, as it allows a person to talk without having to think about grammar and syntax.

A nuber of years ago I noticed that some languages, such as French, have 2 words that translate into English as "to know". One word refers to knowing how to do something, and the other refers to being familiar with something. While these two words do not equate perfectly with procedural memory and implicit memory, the similarity is startling, and brings up the question of how much some of our remote ancestor really understood about the nature of memory.