Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 139 posts

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#41

Post by benj111 »

Evolutionarily speaking, what is the impetus for this?

It isn't like a dangerous situation, where you would benefit from remembering it for the rest of your life, despite only experiencing it once.

Also it isn't like remembering something that you do every day.

The closest approximation I can think of is something that happens seasonally, it is probably beneficial to remember how to harvest the berries of the bonga bonga tree, despite not having seen them for 51 weeks.

Is long term memory not fine grained enough to bother differentiating between 'a year ago' and '20 years ago'?

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#42

Post by mavhc »

VanillaCafe wrote: post #9

> Years later, when we discover these relics and hop on, it’s as if we never stopped biking. I'd like to challenge this. Barring scientific evidence to this fact, it is at best an anecdotal evidence, and so I will submit my own anecdote: I didn't ride a bike for about 10 years. When I started riding again, I definitely felt unsteady for the first few days or weeks compared to my previous riding ability. I was unstead…

Not ridden a bike for 20 years, found a bike in the beach hut we were borrowing, different kind to what I rode, rode it a few miles down the shore with no real problems.

There is one way to forget how to ride a bike, learn to ride a bike that has the steering reversed.

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#43

Post by rhinoceraptor »

exabrial wrote: post #4

Recently, over Thanksgiving break, nieces and nephews applied peer pressure on me to ride a bicycle "and do one of those cool wheelie things". I avoided an ER visit but the resulting process failure proves the hypothesis painfully incorrect.

Were you adept at wheelies before? I’ve been slowly improving my wheelie over the past year or so, I’ve found it doesn’t require daily training but if I go a few weeks without doing one it takes a bit of practice at first.

It’s a weird sensation when you find the right balance spot, and you are looking straight ahead (rather than looking down), it’s like you become the bike.

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#44

Post by rhinoceraptor »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #25

“Most of us learn how to ride a bike during childhood. But as we grow older, many of us stop riding and put those once-beloved bikes in storage.” As a Dutch person, this is so weird to read. How can you get by in day-to-day life without a bike ? Mine broke the other day, nothing big just a snapped cable, but I was without a bike for all of 2 days and it felt like being handicapped.

There isn’t the road infrastructure for most people to feel comfortable riding a bike in the US, so people give up riding bikes after the get a driver’s license, and their bike handling skills and confidence go down.

Also, most bikes in the US aren’t practical like dutch bikes, they’re harder to maintain and they don’t have fenders or racks.

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#45

Post by Broken_Hippo »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #25

“Most of us learn how to ride a bike during childhood. But as we grow older, many of us stop riding and put those once-beloved bikes in storage.” As a Dutch person, this is so weird to read. How can you get by in day-to-day life without a bike ? Mine broke the other day, nothing big just a snapped cable, but I was without a bike for all of 2 days and it felt like being handicapped.

There is a lot to unpack here, honestly.

Simple infrastructure is one of them. Many folks don't have safe options for bicycle transportation, regardless of whether you live in a city or not. Lack of sidewalks, lack of bike lanes, and lack of folks watching out for you. If you live outside a small town, you might have to take non-main roads and have a much longer commute as well.

Weather is an issue in some areas as well. While I can get studded snow tires for a bike here in Norway, I couldn't get them in Indiana. Not only are there these things, but employers frowned upon people arriving to work sweaty or wet (from rain). There were often no employee break rooms to change in, let alone a safe place to store one's bicycle or accessories while one is at work.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that the bicycles themselves were differently styled, at least judging what I saw in Amsterdam. Often, they had wide seats with springs and decently wide tires and a basket or two to hold your stuff. A bike built for comfort plus a place to put stuff helps tremendously.

This leads me to my final point: Distance. I imagine that you can reasonably travel to the grocery store and whatnot on a bicycle. Unfortunately, things are pretty spread out in much of the US. You might have to drive for 20 minutes to get to the grocery store because there aren't any near your house or on your way home from work. This takes much longer on a bicycle. If you do have convenience in this area, you are often paying more for it.

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#46

Post by KineticLensman »

baddox wrote: post #39
KineticLensman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skiing is something else where, for me at least, the 'don't forget' effect applies. I used to ski in a one to two week block every year, for about 20 years (i.e. 2 weeks on then 50 weeks off). Once I reached a certain level (being able to do parallel turns) I never really forgot how to do them, although the first few runs of a new season would be a bit tentative. Something that continued to improve year on year was m…

I’ve never skied, but it seems very similar to riding a bike in that you need to make constant adjustments to maintain balance and avoid obstacles without thinking consciously about every adjustment.

Once you reach a certain level of experience, the mechanics of making a turn become second nature and the degree of conscious active control depends more on the type of slope. A well groomed piste is the equivalent of a freeway and you spend more time checking the traffic (the other skiers) than looking at the road. In contrast, (for me at least) a steep gully or a natural mogul field [0] requires more active conscious thinking about when to turn.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogul_skiing

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#47

Post by Jetroid »

Anecdotal, but perhaps interesting:

I rode a bike every few weeks with my father as a child. When I was 11, I had a pretty serious health condition including paralysis from the waist down. I had to spend several years retraining my muscles to be able to walk and run again.

I'm 22 now, and have just (literally in the past two weeks) started riding a bike again. I wasn't particularly confident but I was happily surprised to discover I had no issue just riding. I'm having trouble with U-turns and signalling, but this feels pretty cool considering that half of my life so far has gone by without riding.

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#48

Post by bambax »

> One thing we know for sure, however, is simple sequences of movements we internalize, even far in the past, are typically preserved for a lifetime.

There may be a way to hack this? That is, store declarative data into procedural memory, so that we never ever forget it?

But maybe there are not many memories that need to be preserved over a long period of time. I can't really think of anything that I would need to remember forever.

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#49

Post by mrob »

j7ake wrote: post #38
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #25

“Most of us learn how to ride a bike during childhood. But as we grow older, many of us stop riding and put those once-beloved bikes in storage.” As a Dutch person, this is so weird to read. How can you get by in day-to-day life without a bike ? Mine broke the other day, nothing big just a snapped cable, but I was without a bike for all of 2 days and it felt like being handicapped.

How flat is Netherlands compared to other countries?

It's flatter than average, but I think most people bringing up flatness are non-cyclists. Regular cyclists know that wind speed is just as important, and the Netherlands has higher wind speed than average. If you've never ridden into a strong headwind you might not realize how much it slows you down.

Re: Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

#50

Post by mrob »

benj111 wrote: post #41

Evolutionarily speaking, what is the impetus for this? It isn't like a dangerous situation, where you would benefit from remembering it for the rest of your life, despite only experiencing it once. Also it isn't like remembering something that you do every day. The closest approximation I can think of is something that happens seasonally, it is probably beneficial to remember how to harvest the berries of the bonga b…

>It isn't like a dangerous situation, where you would benefit from remembering it for the rest of your life

When you first start it feels dangerous. It's much easier to evolve a feeling of danger, caused by things like unexpected body movement, than to evolve an instinctive ability to calculate the true danger.

Post reply on HN