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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?

#101

Post by Fricken »

gameswithgo wrote: post #73
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…

> had this weird experience where a hold that I was too weak to latch at the beginning of a session became easy by the end 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.

I climbed for 13 years, with varying levels of intensity, and stopped for a little over 10 before returning. In the time off I climbed sporadically, but never really stuck with it for more than a month or so. At my peak back in the day I was redpointing gym 13c and could do 35 pullups, and on my first day back I was more like 5.8 and could do one set of 3 pullups and not much more. Now, 6 weeks in I'm pulling hard 5.12 moves here and there but I wouldn't call myself a 5.12 climber, my endurance is shit and when I get into tricky sequences it becomes apparent that the more refined aspects of technique are not coming back quite like riding a bicycle.

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

#102

Post by ken »

black-tea wrote: post #85
baddox wrote: post #6

Does anyone find anything odd or unique about the fact that we don’t forget how to ride a bike? I can’t think of any similar activity that people do forget.

Reading?

Definitely. There are cases where people have forgotten their first spoken language, after enough years away from it.

I'm not sure whether or not this belongs in the same category as riding a bicycle.

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

#103

Post by Sharlin »

black-tea wrote: post #96

Has this actually been tested for a large number of years? I learnt to drive a manual car and then proceeded to not drive for ten years. When I tried to drive again I essentially had to learn again from scratch (quite dangerous actually as I was still fully licensed and everything). Would it actually be the same for a bike? Ten years is quite a long time.

Last time I cycled frequently I was in high school, 15 years ago. After that, I’ve almost exclusively just walked or used public transport. Recently I acquired a used bike and it took literally zero practice or adjustment to get going again. My technique may not be at the level of a serious road cyclist but then again it never was.

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

#105

Post by jplayer01 »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #70
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 sustai…

> 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.

But it's important to note that it took you only a few weeks. Originally learning all these movements probably took years of training and you still knew them so well that you could retrain your muscles to use them like back then. You didn't really forget. If I started swimming now, with near zero experience, I wouldn't be able to imitate that.

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

#106

Post by watertom »

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…

Being shaky and falling over is the difference between remembering how to ride a bicycle and not remembering how to ride a bicycle. You remembered how to ride, you just weren't very good.

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

#107

Post by jplayer01 »

stinos wrote: post #67
coldtea wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Bike riding isn't special. Like every skill you learn, your proficiency will suffer if you don't practice it. That doesn't mean you will entirely forget how to apply that skill, even if lack of practice means you've lost proficiency.

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

#108

Post by jplayer01 »

black-tea wrote: post #96

Has this actually been tested for a large number of years? I learnt to drive a manual car and then proceeded to not drive for ten years. When I tried to drive again I essentially had to learn again from scratch (quite dangerous actually as I was still fully licensed and everything). Would it actually be the same for a bike? Ten years is quite a long time.

> I learnt to drive a manual car

I think it's important to consider a few things. How long did you drive a manual after originally learning it? How long did it take you to learn it? How long did it take you to "relearn" it after the ten years?

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

#109

Post by Smaug123 »

bambax wrote: post #48

> 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 re…

There's an extremely well-known hack: rote learning. It's fallen somewhat out of favour, but it's an excellent way to appear superhuman.

* I learnt hundreds of digits of pi by singing them over and over again until my mouth knew how to form the numbers before my brain caught up.

* People in my class at school tried to learn the French verbs which take "être" by means of various different mnemonic devices; I just ignored the tricks and repeated a phrase on and off for a couple of hours. ("Monty arrived at the entrance when all the rest had returned with Tom; Pa's Moorish descent gives him a venturesome sort of nature." for "monter", "arriver", "entrer", "aller", and so on.)

* amo/amas/amat/amamus/amatis/amant, and indeed most Latin grammar is still taught this way.

* The entire poetry recital field.

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

#110

Post by toast0 »

benj111 wrote: post #75
mrob wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Re remembering a dangerous situation, I was thinking more 'that hairy thing with the pointy teeth just ate my friend, better stay away from it' 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 actual…

Falls and near falls are certainly enough to get some adrenaline flowing. Riding through the woods or particularly rough roads where your wheels scoot to the side on obstacles is exciting too.

My understanding of basic training comes only from popular media, but some of the drills at night without warning to enhance the simulation of danger. Fear of the drill sergeant may work too.

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