71–80 of 139 posts
I rode a bike for 5 years, 3 of them every day before I had a pause of 8 years. Hopped on a bike and it was as if I never had the pause.
My girlfriend just learned to bike on a parking lot at her grandma's, she did this every other weekend for an hour or so. When she started biking as an adult again, she had many problems and even fell a few times on the street.
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 sustai…
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…
It is counter intuitive and counter to my experience when I get back into climbing. Perhaps you have some muscular endurance talent or something, or climbed long enough to create some long lasting physical adaptations.
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.
Cycling seems rational? In a way that adrenaline wouldn't help you remember.
Think of soldiers doing drills. They aren't in danger when they actually do the drill. The idea is that they do it automatically when they are I danger, rather than just freezing. I'm not sure actually shooting at new recruits while training them would lead to effective training, but we could try it :).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
These memories are stored in the centre of the brain and thus presumably evolved well before sentience. Learning how to climb a tree or swim in a fast river are very important survival skills and the ability to not forget them would give you an advantage.
Only when you're actually scared, don't trust the bike and try to overcompensate will you tip over.
You can "get" riding a bike on your first attempt if you're trusting enough. I have seen children do it.
It took myself a few hours before my granddad lost his patience and pushed me down a steep hill. On the way down it clicked (my dad had to catch me because i was too distracted to brake).
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…
And congratulations on your recuperation!
Offshoot topic. I’ve always wondered, Does programming work like riding a bike? Has anyone taken years off programming and come back to it? What was it like?
When I picked up coding again as an adult, I found that although I had forgotten language-specific details (function names and arity, syntax, semantics, and so on), the flow and rhythm of programming had never really left me.
Since then, I've occasionally offered advice or informal tutelage to friends who are picking up programming and have asked for help. My observation is that programming seems to "click" with those who have, at one point or another, built a trivial project or script without following along a tutorial too closely. It doesn't matter how long it's been since they last wrote a line of code, the actual practice of coding sticks with them, and it greatly eases the challenge of further learning. Rote activities like codecademy don't seem to act the same way, since the user never gets into a flow state.
The article linked in the OP doesn't mention natural language learning, but I wonder where that sits in the proposed declarative/procedural binary. There's no getting around the brute memorization involved, but it does seem like certain language acquisition skills can be applied abstractly to grammar comprehension, semantic pattern recognition and the like, and can consequently make one's third or fourth language easier to learn than one's second.