Motor Skills

Motor skills are movement skills, such as walking, running, swimming, and riding a bicycle. Learning a motor skill is a slow and painful process. It is slow because it often takes a lot of time to master it; it is painful because we often make mistakes in the course of learning it (e.g., babies stumble and fall while learning to walk; grade-schoolers get injured while learning to ride a bicycle; adolescents momentarily drown once, twice, or thrice while learning to swim). Research show that brain processes involved in learning a motor skill are slower than those involved in learning other cognitive skills, but they permanently alter connections between neurons that it is almost impossible to forget them.