Thread: How to ride a bicylce. Brain training

I was sent this little video. Wow!
http://viewpure.com/MFzDaBzBlL0?ref=bkmk
Worth the watching. That is, that it is worth watching, in my opinion!
~Richard

Definitely worth watching, thanks Richard!

If it is the one with the bicycle, then yeah . . . VERY INTERESTING.

And, being of Dutch heritage, I loved the Amsterdam portion.

It has nothing to do with knowledge. It's about balance and by changing the handlebar mechanism you are throwing it off and tricking the brain. So you have to retrain the brain in an opposite fashion which takes longer.

Outstanding lesson!

Thanks for posting that food for thought.

Bob

Yea, kind of like using the old Radio Shack scopes, where up, is down and right is left, makes some people crazy.

Thanks Richard - he's a funny guy with very good videos.

I remember learning this when I was may be 9 or 10 - not riding the bike backwards but that it's all in your head.
In my case it was that we all see upside down and left-right reversed (it's basic optics - the image projected on the retina is flipped). The book I read it in described how people were given glasses that flipped it once again, so the image on their retina matched the image in the real world and it took them between few days to few weeks for the brain to readjust and they felt they have natural coordination.


Of course, all of us have probably experienced this when first learning to shave with a straight razor, looking in the mirror your hand goes in the opposite direction that you think it should goe. Soon enough we can all train the brain and 'build the muscle memory' and it becomes 'as easy as riding a bike' anyway you're used to riding it

I have an old Indian motorcycle with a left hand throttle foot clutch etc. That was surprisingly easy for me to learn. What I worry about is a panic situation. My brother has an old Ducati with a left hand throttle and the foot brake and shifter are "backwards." Once on a test ride I came to a 90" corner and decided to tap the brakes and then upshifted.... 3 times before I figured out what was wrong. I was going twice as fast as I wanted when I entered the corner! It all came out well!

An interesting one to me on a similar vein is eye dominance. You can train yourself to shoot with your non dominate eye but in a panic/big buck situation your dominate eye wants to take over.

This is comparable to a couple of experiences I have had. In the early 90's I had to do a lot of microinjection of embryos, but my lab could not afford a decent microinjection setup. I cannibalized parts from three other systems and cobbled together a working system.

Unfortunately, I could not get the hydraulics of the joystick system to work correctly for all three axes. Y and Z were correct, with the movement of my hand matching the direction of movement of the injection needle, but the X axis was reversed. When I wanted to puncture the embryo with a rapid movement of the needle to the left, I had to snap the joystick to the right, but the simultaneous Y aspects of the movements were correct. I adapted to this over time but then we ended up buying a brand spanking new complete system. It took a little over two weeks for my brain to re-wire. In the mean time, I busted a lot of injection needles because withdrawing from the embryo required rapid movement of the needle to the right, which I was used to doing by jamming the joystick to the left, which in the new system jammed the fragile glass needle into the holding pipet and shattered the needle. After about two weeks it just clicked and I could do correctly.



Later, using a microscope system with a camera that was a little to slow, I experienced similar frustration. Like riding the bike, your brain triggers rapid micro-adjustments to your muscles during every movement. If your visual cues do not match your muscles's movement cues, your brain fights with itself. When my boss tried to use the microscope system to which I had long since adapted, he became frustrated trying to move a pipet tip within the field of view of the scope. He was nearly paralyzed and said "I know where I want it to go but it won't go where I want it to go."

If you want to experience something similar for yourself, take a hand mirror and a pencil and try to trace some typeface with the pencil while only looking at it in the mirror. This was pretty much what the guy on the bike was experiencing.