system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are some skills perishable, while others are not?

Last evening I was reading a book, and it said something along the lines of 'unlike riding a bike, piloting an aircraft is a perishable skill.'

This made me wonder: why are some skills perishable if we don't make use of them, while others, such as riding a bike, are things you can pick up even years later?
gpt
Some skills are motoric coordination - like riding a bike, and others are cognitive processes, like what button to push when while flying a plane.

Motoric skills become hard-wired in your brain, you actually build the necessary structures that connect certain balance-governing reflexes with certain repetitive movements, like pushing the pedals while keeping the bike upright. Your entire body learns this process and it remains in your neuronal structure.

Cognitive skills are basically knowledge becoming routine, so while you are doing it regularly, it becomes less and less cognitively effortfull to accomplish. If you stop doing it, however, you begin to forget what needs to be done when.
Also, once you learned to fly a certain type of plane, fly it for about 5000 hours in total (over a period of some years), and then stop flying it for 10 years, if you got back into the cockpit of such a machine, you'd still remember quite a bit and would only need to "refresh your memory" for a relatively short time before being good to go again.