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

scientificamerican.com

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

#61

Post by starbeast »

Fricken wrote: post #33
adrianN wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technique is super important. Female climbers obviously don't have the same kind of strength as men, which is why they climb differently. That doesn't mean that they're (much) worse than their male competitors.

In terms of strength to weight ratio, top women are pretty damn good, in sport they're only a couple letter grades behind the top men, and there are only 3 men in history who have outclimbed the best female climber, and only Adam Ondra, who is truly a genius of gymnastic climbing has sent 5.15D. At that level their technique is pretty close to being maxed out. They spend months, sometimes years training specifically…

>There's just so many more men out there dedicated to climbing hard than women.

There's a study that looked into this for chess and found that for the amount of people who actually stick at it, 96% of the the split in chess can be accounted for by it being what you would expect for the amount of men and women playing.

>Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains

>A popular explanation for the small number of women at the top level of intellectually demanding activities from chess to science appeals to biological differences in the intellectual abilities of men and women. An alternative explanation is that the extreme values in a large sample are likely to be greater than those in a small one. Although the performance of the 100 best German male chess players is better than that of the 100 best German women, we show that 96 per cent of the observed difference would be expected given the much greater number of men who play chess. There is little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for. In science, where there are many more male than female participants, this statistical sampling explanation, rather than differences in intellectual ability, may also be the main reason why women are under-represented at the top end.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1659/1161

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

#62

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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 unsteady enough that I thought at the time, "People that say you don't forget how to ride a bike are full of shit."

Err, "feeling unsteady" while still riding is not the same as forgetting how to ride and falling like a kid who tries to ride for their first time.

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

#63

Post by coldtea »

avip wrote: post #11
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…

Seconded. It takes serious mileage and time to regain full fluency. I am sure this is measurable - I actually fell once after a few years break, as I was not used to manoeuvring between cars. It's like saying "you don't forget how to play the piano". Well you don't, and you do, depends on how you define the "knowing" discussed - something the article did not do for obvious reasons.

"Forgetting to ride a bike" is not about fluency. Of course you'll lose the fluency if you were advanced biker at some point.

It's about forgetting HOW TO RIDE, the very basic trick of balancing the bike.

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

#64

Post by kalleboo »

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.

They drive. And yes, it's as bad as it sounds. My wife can't ride a bike (balance issues) so she drives everywhere. If I don't have milk for my morning coffee I hop on the bike and it's 5 minutes or less to get to the supermarket. She wouldn't go out to just buy milk since just finding a parking spot takes 5 minutes.

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

#65

Post by stinos »

aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #55
Fricken wrote: post #5

I was once an avid rock climber, but stopped for many years. One night on a surf trip in Indonesia I had someone hold my beer while I climbed a palm tree, which was only about 15 feet high, but that's still high enough that you don't want to fall. I got to the top of the trunk and reached up to grab one of the branches, and it was like, 'oh man, I'm so out of condition, I can barely grip this'. But then, accidentally…

Nitpicking: adrenaline doesn’t act that rapidly. Rather it’s the sympathetic response to a perceived threat.

A.k.a. instinct. Wouldn't the majority of people in this situation, past climbing experience or not, try to hold on to that branch with all possible strength? It's either that or possibly severe injury/death. It's possible the climbing experience makes the OP do this action in a better way than people with no such experience though.

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

#66

Post by aaaaaaaaaab »

stinos wrote: post #65
aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpicking: adrenaline doesn’t act that rapidly. Rather it’s the sympathetic response to a perceived threat.

A.k.a. instinct. Wouldn't the majority of people in this situation, past climbing experience or not, try to hold on to that branch with all possible strength? It's either that or possibly severe injury/death. It's possible the climbing experience makes the OP do this action in a better way than people with no such experience though.

Yes, as illustrated in this video: https://youtu.be/dLBJA8SlH2w

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

#67

Post by stinos »

coldtea wrote: post #63
avip wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. It takes serious mileage and time to regain full fluency. I am sure this is measurable - I actually fell once after a few years break, as I was not used to manoeuvring between cars. It's like saying "you don't forget how to play the piano". Well you don't, and you do, depends on how you define the "knowing" discussed - something the article did not do for obvious reasons.

"Forgetting to ride a bike" is not about fluency. Of course you'll lose the fluency if you were advanced biker at some point. It's about forgetting HOW TO RIDE, the very basic trick of balancing the bike.

the very basic trick of balancing the bike

Which is exactly the point the OP makes to that sentence as if we never stopped biking I think. At the least I'd say it's worded incorrectly. Sure your brain remembers the key part of how to do it, but the finer motor skills, balancing in hard situations etc don't just come back from one instance to the next and take extra practice.

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

#69

Post by dsego »

I don't think many kids/people even learn how to ride it properly. I see it all the time, causal riders don't know how to mount or dismount and keep their saddle to low so they can put their feet down and I guess feel safer. It depends of what you mean by "riding" a bike. If it is just not falling over, then yeah, but also most people don't forget how to hold a pencil.

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

#70

Post by heavenlyblue »

Jetroid wrote: post #47

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 surpris…

To be fair, I think the article misses one of the points, though: for example, I had a time between 14 and about 22 when I didn't swim at all, having spent about 4 years doing swimming as a sport.

When I started swimming again at the age of 22, I could swim obviously - but it took me weeks of re-remembering all of the correct positions of my hands, which muscles to contract and how should I breathe in order to sustain that swimming for longer than a few laps.

I am pretty sure it's the same with the bike-riding.

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