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

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

#121

Post by aaronmdjones »

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 did my driving lessons and my test in a Vauxhall Astra Manual. I then drove a Ford Fiesta Semi-Automatic for 2 and a half years before it failed (edit: late last year). At the dealership remained one second-hand one-previous-owner Vauxhall Astra Manual. Took it for a test drive that day, I was shifting gears and using the clutch perfectly in a large car park after only 5 or so minutes. I drove it back to the dealership myself. I drove it home the following Monday. I passed my Advanced Driving Test in it earlier this year. Some things are definitely not forgotten.

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

#122

Post by pbhjpbhj »

KineticLensman wrote: post #27
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.

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…

After a break of ~15 years I went for a couple of hours on an indoor slope. The main issue was fitness. I was able to go over a small jump by the end of the time. Not as graceful as I would have been.

Very similar to my experience with cycling with long breaks.

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

#123

Post by pbhjpbhj »

black-tea wrote: post #87
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adults who have never learned how to ride a bike can’t “just get on a bike and ride it” no matter how much explaining you do. It’s one of those things immigrants need to learn when they move to this country (the Netherlands) and it’s certainly not as easy as you suggest.

I taught an adult to ride a bike and he was pretty good after only an hour or so, to be honest. It's true that adults can't just do it, but it's also nowhere near as hard as it for children.

We used a balance bike (well normal bike with seat down and pedals removed) on 3 occasions, probably a total of 1h30 at most. Then put pedals on and kiddo just set off and rode.

There's probably a wide variance in these things.

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

#124

Post by Izkata »

laurieg wrote: post #83
FatalLogic wrote: post #2

I'll suggest that we don't forget to how to ride a bike because a very important part of that skill is confidence and self-belief. It's similar to swimming. Does anybody ever forget how to swim? If you don't believe you can ride a bike then you'll tend to wobble around slowly and cautiously and overcorrect by manual steering. If you don't believe you can swim then you'll try to constantly hold your face too high abov…

I think this is a great point. More confidence -> more speed -> more stable bicycle. Part of me wonders if learning to ride a bike actually isn't all that difficult in the grand scheme of things, but we all remember it as being tricky because we did it at such a young (and uncoordinated) age.

In one episode of Canada's Worst Driver, when the host finds out a contestant never learned to ride a bike, they went out to teach him. It didn't take very long, though offhand I can't remember a duration.

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

#125

Post by pbalau »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #111
jplayer01 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 kne…

>> 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. Nah. I am actually making the opposite point: I had to consciously re-remember (from whatever I remembered my instructor told me) how it were back then and retrain myself to do it correctly all over again. For example, getting over anxiety that I wo…

I think you are missing a tiny point, you are comparing being able not to drown to swimming efficiently. I didn't bike in ages, but I am fairly confident I can ride a bicycle all right. To go back doing cross country biking is a different matter, I will probably need to make mental efforts to keep the right posture, to keep the weight over my back wheel etc. But this doesn't mean I won't be able to ride my bike without crashing.

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

#126

Post by ncmncm »

I teach kids to ride in 30 seconds, routinely.

Just don't lie to them -- kids spend all the learning time discovering that the right way is opposite to what they were told. How do I teach? I tell them to balance with the handlebars, and steer by leaning. It always works, and fast! Try it, it's fun.

So the answer to the title question is just that riding is very, very easy.

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

#127

Post by jayd16 »

laurieg wrote: post #83
FatalLogic wrote: post #2

I'll suggest that we don't forget to how to ride a bike because a very important part of that skill is confidence and self-belief. It's similar to swimming. Does anybody ever forget how to swim? If you don't believe you can ride a bike then you'll tend to wobble around slowly and cautiously and overcorrect by manual steering. If you don't believe you can swim then you'll try to constantly hold your face too high abov…

I think this is a great point. More confidence -> more speed -> more stable bicycle. Part of me wonders if learning to ride a bike actually isn't all that difficult in the grand scheme of things, but we all remember it as being tricky because we did it at such a young (and uncoordinated) age.

>Part of me wonders if learning to ride a bike actually isn't all that difficult

This is my theory as well. I can't think of anyone (baring some handicap or injury) who has attempted to learn and wasn't able to ride.

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

#128

Post by AngryData »

laurieg wrote: post #83
FatalLogic wrote: post #2

I'll suggest that we don't forget to how to ride a bike because a very important part of that skill is confidence and self-belief. It's similar to swimming. Does anybody ever forget how to swim? If you don't believe you can ride a bike then you'll tend to wobble around slowly and cautiously and overcorrect by manual steering. If you don't believe you can swim then you'll try to constantly hold your face too high abov…

I think this is a great point. More confidence -> more speed -> more stable bicycle. Part of me wonders if learning to ride a bike actually isn't all that difficult in the grand scheme of things, but we all remember it as being tricky because we did it at such a young (and uncoordinated) age.

If you remove the pedals and have a kid just push themselves around with their feet first, they learn how to ride a bike WAY faster. In part because they don't have to learn to pedal at the same time, but I think it's more because they are confident they can put their feet down to catch themselves whenever they want without getting caught in the pedals. Training wheels make learning to ride a bike harder in many cases. Either the kid relies on the training wheels to hold them up instead of balancing, or if they don't have the ground conditions to do that they fear the training wheels catching dirt or grass or a rock and suddenly flinging them around making them crash.

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

#129

Post by fjsolwmv »

starbeast wrote: post #61
Fricken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intellectu…

"the amount of people who actually stick to it" is an absolutely massive sampling bias, even at age under 10. Even among people of same general intelligence, areas of interest matters a lot.

I don't doubt there are sexism and cultural effects on participation disparities, but ask anyone raising chess-playing children and you'll find notable gender differences in interest level in chess from a young age. Similar is seen on mathematics. There's a classic book from Soviet Russia) where girls' math education was rather highly supported) by an author extremely excited about teaching math to small children. He found that his son lapped it up but he could never get his daughter interested (she would turn his math games into non-math social games), even though she was younger and so had earlier exposure and also benefit of his increased experience practicing teaching on her older brother first. She turned out to be academically successful, but not exceptional in math. Countless parents can tell similar stories.

https://www.amazon.com/Math-Three-Seven-Mathematical-Prescho...

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

#130

Post by fjsolwmv »

Fricken wrote: post #37
cube2222 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate to the "getting easier when nearing the end" feeling. I play cello and whenever I don't play for a week or more and I just sit down to play, my hands lack a lot of dexterity and are imprecise. Most people just play for half an hour to get it all back. However, what I noticed is that if I play for a minute- or two, make an hour break and come back to play again, my hands are fully ready to play, as though…

Actually, in trying to describe the phenomenon to a friend I drew the analogy of a musician who hasn't picked up a guitar in a while trying to remember how to hit a particular chord. They kind of fumble around for a bit, and all of the sudden their fingers just fall into place and they got it.

You don't even need a special skill to see this effect. Just try to remember the name of someone you knew kind of well but haven't thought about in 5 years. Often you'll get that "tip of your tongue" feeling and the name will magically appear in your consciousness several minutes later.
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