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

141 points by Deinos 8y ago

FatalLogic 8y ago
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 above the water and you will struggle because keeping your head high is not an ideal posture for buoyancy and balance. If you believe you can ride a bike then you will set off confidently and move faster, which helps with balance and control. These are examples of abilities in which it's easy to get stuck in a local optima which feels safer but is very inefficient, such as cycling with your feet ready to touch the ground or swimming with your head high above the water. This theory, of course, doesn't mean the research in the article is wrong, but maybe it's just a part of the truth.
- baddox 8y ago
  I don’t think that the confidence requirement is a major factor. I suspect that activities that require similar coordination of motor skills but which aren’t dangerous to fail at are also hard to forget. I’m thinking of things like juggling or tying a shoe.
- odiroot 8y ago
  Yes, I forgot how to swim. Learned it in primary school and didn't practice at all until Uni. Nearly 10 years later and I struggle to keep from drowning.
- laurieg 8y ago
  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.
  - Izkata 8y ago
    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.
  - jayd16 8y ago
    >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.
  - AngryData 8y ago
    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.
- aidenn0 8y ago
  But, anecdotally at least, you can unlearn how to ride a bike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think you are on to something. Biking doesn't require any special muscles or strength so you can do it purely from memory. With other activities you also need some physical skills untrained people don't have. When I did kickboxing I used to be able to kick really high but after a few years of not doing it the muscle memory is still there but I just don't have the strength and flexibility to go really high.
- Too 8y ago
  Yep. A bike is self stabilizing due to the design of the dropout on the fork. If you lean left it automatically turns left which will push you upright again. It is hard to not stay balanced on a bike. Unless you are on uneven or slippery surface, or do other stunts, the only way you can really fall is if you are moving too slow or you are deliberately forcing your handlebars to turn very hard.
jonas21 8y ago
Reminded me of this Smarter Every Day video, which is definitely worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 (The Backwards Brain Bicycle)
- aequitas 8y ago
  I also rode this kind of bike once as a kid on a fair. Same thing, the reflex was to strong and familiar to consciously override it. I had a similar experience like this when I wanted to learn snowboarding, I tried to do it myself without lessons. Learning to stand, slide (front and back) and break on a board was 'easy'. But I was taking to long teaching myself to turn a slide into a slalom properly. Turned out my reflex to break was to strong and I had to force myself to unlearn this reflex.
exabrial 8y ago
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.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  How much more do you weigh from the last time you did one of those cool wheelie things regularly?
- rhinoceraptor 8y ago
  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.
Fricken 8y ago
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, my feet cut loose. A jolt of adrenaline shot through me, and I managed to hold on one handed to this slippery, slopey palm tree branch as my body swung away from the trunk of the tree. This whole chain of muscles from my fingers down to my lower back fired at once. I used to use those muscles all the time when I climbed regularly, but on the tree I didn't have access to that strength until the adrenaline kicked in, and then it was all there like it had never left. Of course, because I was out of condition I strained every muscle in that chain and I had to skip a few days of surfing. But it had me thinking about procedural memory, and how it relates to skills where raw strength is a factor. Strength is memory. There is physical conditioning needed to utilize that strength without hurting yourself, but how strong you are is about neural pathways in your muscles, and how they fire, not the muscle itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip the tendons from your bones. Now I'm back into climbing, but when I was first starting out I 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's counterintuitive, if anything you should be getting weaker as you wear yourself out, but, after a decade of not climbing much at all, my finger muscles were remembering how to fire the way they needed to to stick that particular hold, and they got stronger. Now I'm at the point where my strength has mostly returned, but my tendons aren't yet resilient enough to handle the stress when I'm at my limit, so I've got to be really careful. This was all a big revelation for me.
- pdelbarba 8y ago
  This kind of illustrates an important point that I think a lot of people don't realize. Strength isn't just muscle mass but also neurological conditioning. You're not just stimulating your muscles to get bigger when you work out but also refining the "programming" used to control them. In some cases, possibly like yours, this effect can dominate everything else. This is also separate from the application technique as well, such as in the cases of body builders losing to much smaller pro arm-wrestlers.
baddox 8y ago
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.
- ken 8y ago
  Despite what the article suggests about playing a musical instrument, I picked up an instrument that I used to play (for ~10 years), a couple years ago, and I was completely lost. Tone, pitch, form, fingering, tuning, reading sheet music, knowing scales -- pretty much everything was just gone. It was not at all "like riding a bike". I played around for a few weeks but it felt like I was starting from scratch.
  - baddox 8y ago
    I’m a musician, so I considered the example of playing an instrument. It’s an interesting example, because it certainly requires a lot of muscle memory that becomes “automatic” with practice, but it also usually requires conscious thought about what you’re playing (which basic bicycling does not). I would expect that the basic muscle memory parts would be hard to forget, but that the conscious decisions would be easy to forget. I’ve never taken long breaks from my main instruments, but it sounds like you forgot both aspects of playing. I did play trombone for a few years starting in middle school, but haven’t played in over a decade. I definitely remember the basic slide positions for notes and a few of the common scales, but I wonder how well I would be able to play the trombone now.
    - aidenn0 8y ago
      I didn't play my clarinet at all for 5ish years (and was only playing it once or twice a year for the 5 previous years), and getting a good sound out of it was impossible[1], but basic technique (e.g. scales, arpeggios, sight reading) was still about as good as 4 years in to when I was learning as a kid. 1: At least some of this is mouth muscles just being too weak (in another thread an ex rock climber talks about climbing a tree and that's a similar effect), some of it is that when I quit, I was still learning to make it sound good, so I never had unconscious control for a lot of the subtle changes I had to make. The rest is probably just things I forgot.
VanillaCafe 8y ago
> 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 unsteady enough that I thought at the time, "People that say you don't forget how to ride a bike are full of shit." Granted, my ability to ride came back faster than if I was learning from scratch. It might become a discussion determining different shades of "forget" -- but if we get to that point, then we've conceded the crisp assertion that "we don't forget how to ride a bike".
- avip 8y ago
  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.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    "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.
    - stinos 8y ago
      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.
      - 8y ago
hansthehorse 8y ago
Without evidence - I don't think it's that we don't forget how to ride but that an adult, any adult, can just get on a bike and ride it after operation is explained. Since everyone, or most everyone, rode one as a child we confuse this with "remembering" how to ride rather than having the adult reflexes and balance to naturally ride.
- avip 8y ago
  This is immediately falsified by grabbing an adult, any adult, and watch him learn a thing, anything, that relies on subtle balance and body control.
- therein 8y ago
  I imagine they'd have a hard time keeping the front bar straight. I remember that being the main issue when I was learning it as a kid. Had I not acquired that sense of balance associated with the front bar's alignment through practice, I don't think I would have been able to hear someone say "conservation of angular momentum", pick up a bike and start riding it.
- grayrest 8y ago
  An anecdote: I own a recumbent bike. Learning to ride it wasn't difficult, I was able to wobble around and had to regularly put my foot down the first couple minutes and got my balance for real within a day. I let other people ride it when they ask me about it and my experience seems fairly normal. By contrast, at one point I went 10 years without riding a bike. When I got back on, I could immediately ride. No wobbling, no learning curve. I've seen videos of other adults learning to ride bikes and it doesn't take them long to learn how to ride but it's not immediate.
- Aaargh20318 8y ago
  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.
Aaargh20318 8y ago
“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.
- theredbox 8y ago
  Because we live in a different kind of cities where we cant use bikes as much. It takes me 1.5h each day in seoul to reach my destination and we have an excellent public transportation.
- trustfundbaby 8y ago
  > How can you get by in day-to-day life without a bike ? By living in most cities in the USA? :D
  - Aaargh20318 8y ago
    I’ve only been to the US once (San Francisco) and US cities are strange to me. Especially the fact that there is no real city centre, just blocks of buildings with wide streets between them.
    - kurthr 8y ago
      The city isn't flat either... it has many hills in the middle that are 10-12% grade and a few at around 30%.
    - trustfundbaby 8y ago
      Most American cities do have a city center though ... which ones have you visited.
- afroboy 8y ago
  Where i live there is no why you find flat ground, if you drove a bike you spend most of your time up and go which is very exhausting and don't forget not everyone has special roads for bikes.
picsao 8y ago
My personal assumption is that all that comes close to the rush of the animal hunting experience rewires a part of the brain.
benj111 8y ago
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'?
- mrob 8y ago
  >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.
  - benj111 8y ago
    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 actually shooting at new recruits while training them would lead to effective training, but we could try it :).
    - toast0 8y ago
      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.
- lexicality 8y ago
Jetroid 8y ago
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.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  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.
  - jxi 8y ago
    Would that mean that the main thing you actually learn is confidence? Your brain knows that you were able to do this before, so it makes you behave physically in such a way that you assume you'll succeed (which ends up helping you succeed) even though really you don't have the muscle/technique memories anymore.
  - Andrex 8y ago
    Swimming uses more muscles and requires more concentration. I had a large amount of form degradation when I took a years' break swimming, and it took a few weeks to get back in form. I was noticeably faster after I regained my form -- I'm not sure what the equivalent would be on a bike, since theoretically I would just need to pedal faster (requiring more raw strength, not form.) I don't think there's much comparison to the bike example in the OP.
bambax 8y ago
> 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.
- jusssi 8y ago
  Add a little song and dance around the narrative. It's ridiculous how well I can still remember many of the kids' songs and poems, even though I have little recollection of anything else left from that time.
- Smaug123 8y ago
  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.
mrfusion 8y ago
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?
- cribbles 8y ago
  I spent a lot of time writing TI-BASIC and PHP/MySQL when I was about 11-13. Stopped programming in any serious capacity for about a decade. 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.
dsego 8y ago
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.
k__ 8y ago
Probably depends on how much practice you had back in the days. 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.
tylergetsay 8y ago
This also works for a unicycle. It took me over a year to learn how to ride when I was a kid, as an adult I can still do it. My mother also learned as a child and was able to do it again as an adult. In my experience, there is a weird difference in the type of balance. I know how to hold my chest/core to stay up straight, but my unconscious ability to hold that stable isn't the same. Hence I wobbled a bit more, but I didn't fall.
chmod775 8y ago
Because the main "skill" to riding a bike is actually overcoming your fear that it'll tip over. A bike is naturally stable while moving and your body's natural sense of balance will do the rest. 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).
- mxfh 8y ago
  I think it the same thing riding bike isn't intrinsically hard to learn, it's about confidence and overcoming fear a lot too. Same goes for downhill skiing, havent done it in years, but would not hesitate.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
victor106 8y ago
From the excellent smartereverday youtube channel https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0 https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0 Strongly recommend to watch the above video.He does an experiment on how long it takes to get comfortable by changing the handle bars.
rossdavidh 8y ago
My wife knew how to ride a bike as a child, and now does not know how, and BOY does it get her angry if someone says you never forget.
scarface74 8y ago
I have a slight physical impairment that makes it harder (but not impossible) to do things that require coordination - like riding a bike and swimming. I had to learn to adapt. Last year I rode a bike for the first time in over 25 years and I struggled with balance and coordination. It would take me at least a week to remember. I also have to concentrate on my form to swim. If I was dropped in a pool, I could swim back but it would take me awhile to remember my proper form so so I wouldn’t favor one side over the other. I was also a fitness instructor for a little over 10 years, and stopped about 6 years ago because of $life. I remembered some of my old step routines, but I struggled trying to get all my body parts to work together again to do it. There are a few things that I physical can do, but it takes me a lot longer and a lot more practice to get it.
someearth 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8
black-tea 8y ago
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.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  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.
  - barbarr 8y ago
    On the contrary, I used to cycle often when I was around 10 or so, and then never cycled when I was older. Then, when I was 21, I needed to use a bike to travel around work, but it turned out for some reason I had completely forgotten how to ride and had to pick up the skill anew. It's still a mystery to me how I completely forgot the skill and had to relearn it.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  > 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?
- aaronmdjones 8y ago
  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.
sorokod 8y ago
Perhaps it is not that difficult to learn how to ride a bike as an adult and lack of previous experience is hard to measure.
sys_64738 8y ago
Just like we don't forget how to drive a car. It becomes instinctive.
RandomGuyDTB 8y ago
I've learned how to ride a bike twice and I've forgotten it twice - I still don't quite believe people "never forget" how to ride a bike (given a long enough time).
aristophenes 8y ago
Two unique things about bikes is that it is harder the slower you go, and it uses a skill, balance, that we practice every day as we stand and walk. When you are a child, afraid of falling, with no experience, you want to go very slow. And that is the hardest way to ride a bike. As you increase speed it wants to stay more stable (on a flat surface). Just the knowledge that you have done it before, that it is an easy thing, means that in the first second you are accelerating to a speed where it is in fact easy to ride a bike. I don't think that particular example is as much about skill as it is about confidence. Frankly, the experience "you don't forget how to ride a bike" was true for me the very first time I rode a bike. My mom was holding on to the bike, then we moved faster, then a few seconds later I realized my mom had stopped behind me and I had been doing it on my own. We just had reached a speed where that became easy. And then the trick was not panicking ;)
ncmncm 8y ago
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.
pier25 8y ago
But why do we seem to forget more complex stuff like playing the piano which is also procedural?

141 points by Deinos 8y ago

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 above the water and you will struggle because keeping your head high is not an ideal posture for buoyancy and balance. If you believe you can ride a bike then you will set off confidently and move faster, which helps with balance and control. These are examples of abilities in which it's easy to get stuck in a local optima which feels safer but is very inefficient, such as cycling with your feet ready to touch the ground or swimming with your head high above the water. This theory, of course, doesn't mean the research in the article is wrong, but maybe it's just a part of the truth.

baddox 8y ago
I don’t think that the confidence requirement is a major factor. I suspect that activities that require similar coordination of motor skills but which aren’t dangerous to fail at are also hard to forget. I’m thinking of things like juggling or tying a shoe.
odiroot 8y ago
Yes, I forgot how to swim. Learned it in primary school and didn't practice at all until Uni. Nearly 10 years later and I struggle to keep from drowning.
laurieg 8y ago
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.
- Izkata 8y ago
  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.
- jayd16 8y ago
  >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.
- AngryData 8y ago
  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.
aidenn0 8y ago
But, anecdotally at least, you can unlearn how to ride a bike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0
maxxxxx 8y ago
I think you are on to something. Biking doesn't require any special muscles or strength so you can do it purely from memory. With other activities you also need some physical skills untrained people don't have. When I did kickboxing I used to be able to kick really high but after a few years of not doing it the muscle memory is still there but I just don't have the strength and flexibility to go really high.
Too 8y ago
Yep. A bike is self stabilizing due to the design of the dropout on the fork. If you lean left it automatically turns left which will push you upright again. It is hard to not stay balanced on a bike. Unless you are on uneven or slippery surface, or do other stunts, the only way you can really fall is if you are moving too slow or you are deliberately forcing your handlebars to turn very hard.

jonas21 8y ago

Reminded me of this Smarter Every Day video, which is definitely worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 (The Backwards Brain Bicycle)

aequitas 8y ago
I also rode this kind of bike once as a kid on a fair. Same thing, the reflex was to strong and familiar to consciously override it. I had a similar experience like this when I wanted to learn snowboarding, I tried to do it myself without lessons. Learning to stand, slide (front and back) and break on a board was 'easy'. But I was taking to long teaching myself to turn a slide into a slalom properly. Turned out my reflex to break was to strong and I had to force myself to unlearn this reflex.

exabrial 8y ago

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.

newnewpdro 8y ago
How much more do you weigh from the last time you did one of those cool wheelie things regularly?
rhinoceraptor 8y ago
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.

Fricken 8y ago

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, my feet cut loose. A jolt of adrenaline shot through me, and I managed to hold on one handed to this slippery, slopey palm tree branch as my body swung away from the trunk of the tree. This whole chain of muscles from my fingers down to my lower back fired at once. I used to use those muscles all the time when I climbed regularly, but on the tree I didn't have access to that strength until the adrenaline kicked in, and then it was all there like it had never left. Of course, because I was out of condition I strained every muscle in that chain and I had to skip a few days of surfing. But it had me thinking about procedural memory, and how it relates to skills where raw strength is a factor. Strength is memory. There is physical conditioning needed to utilize that strength without hurting yourself, but how strong you are is about neural pathways in your muscles, and how they fire, not the muscle itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip the tendons from your bones. Now I'm back into climbing, but when I was first starting out I 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's counterintuitive, if anything you should be getting weaker as you wear yourself out, but, after a decade of not climbing much at all, my finger muscles were remembering how to fire the way they needed to to stick that particular hold, and they got stronger. Now I'm at the point where my strength has mostly returned, but my tendons aren't yet resilient enough to handle the stress when I'm at my limit, so I've got to be really careful. This was all a big revelation for me.

pdelbarba 8y ago
This kind of illustrates an important point that I think a lot of people don't realize. Strength isn't just muscle mass but also neurological conditioning. You're not just stimulating your muscles to get bigger when you work out but also refining the "programming" used to control them. In some cases, possibly like yours, this effect can dominate everything else. This is also separate from the application technique as well, such as in the cases of body builders losing to much smaller pro arm-wrestlers.

baddox 8y ago

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.

ken 8y ago
Despite what the article suggests about playing a musical instrument, I picked up an instrument that I used to play (for ~10 years), a couple years ago, and I was completely lost. Tone, pitch, form, fingering, tuning, reading sheet music, knowing scales -- pretty much everything was just gone. It was not at all "like riding a bike". I played around for a few weeks but it felt like I was starting from scratch.
- baddox 8y ago
  I’m a musician, so I considered the example of playing an instrument. It’s an interesting example, because it certainly requires a lot of muscle memory that becomes “automatic” with practice, but it also usually requires conscious thought about what you’re playing (which basic bicycling does not). I would expect that the basic muscle memory parts would be hard to forget, but that the conscious decisions would be easy to forget. I’ve never taken long breaks from my main instruments, but it sounds like you forgot both aspects of playing. I did play trombone for a few years starting in middle school, but haven’t played in over a decade. I definitely remember the basic slide positions for notes and a few of the common scales, but I wonder how well I would be able to play the trombone now.
  - aidenn0 8y ago
    I didn't play my clarinet at all for 5ish years (and was only playing it once or twice a year for the 5 previous years), and getting a good sound out of it was impossible[1], but basic technique (e.g. scales, arpeggios, sight reading) was still about as good as 4 years in to when I was learning as a kid. 1: At least some of this is mouth muscles just being too weak (in another thread an ex rock climber talks about climbing a tree and that's a similar effect), some of it is that when I quit, I was still learning to make it sound good, so I never had unconscious control for a lot of the subtle changes I had to make. The rest is probably just things I forgot.

VanillaCafe 8y ago

> 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 unsteady enough that I thought at the time, "People that say you don't forget how to ride a bike are full of shit." Granted, my ability to ride came back faster than if I was learning from scratch. It might become a discussion determining different shades of "forget" -- but if we get to that point, then we've conceded the crisp assertion that "we don't forget how to ride a bike".

avip 8y ago
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.
- coldtea 8y ago
  "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.
  - stinos 8y ago
    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.
    - 8y ago

hansthehorse 8y ago

Without evidence - I don't think it's that we don't forget how to ride but that an adult, any adult, can just get on a bike and ride it after operation is explained. Since everyone, or most everyone, rode one as a child we confuse this with "remembering" how to ride rather than having the adult reflexes and balance to naturally ride.

avip 8y ago
This is immediately falsified by grabbing an adult, any adult, and watch him learn a thing, anything, that relies on subtle balance and body control.
therein 8y ago
I imagine they'd have a hard time keeping the front bar straight. I remember that being the main issue when I was learning it as a kid. Had I not acquired that sense of balance associated with the front bar's alignment through practice, I don't think I would have been able to hear someone say "conservation of angular momentum", pick up a bike and start riding it.
grayrest 8y ago
An anecdote: I own a recumbent bike. Learning to ride it wasn't difficult, I was able to wobble around and had to regularly put my foot down the first couple minutes and got my balance for real within a day. I let other people ride it when they ask me about it and my experience seems fairly normal. By contrast, at one point I went 10 years without riding a bike. When I got back on, I could immediately ride. No wobbling, no learning curve. I've seen videos of other adults learning to ride bikes and it doesn't take them long to learn how to ride but it's not immediate.
Aaargh20318 8y ago
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.

Aaargh20318 8y ago

“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.

theredbox 8y ago
Because we live in a different kind of cities where we cant use bikes as much. It takes me 1.5h each day in seoul to reach my destination and we have an excellent public transportation.
trustfundbaby 8y ago
> How can you get by in day-to-day life without a bike ? By living in most cities in the USA? :D
- Aaargh20318 8y ago
  I’ve only been to the US once (San Francisco) and US cities are strange to me. Especially the fact that there is no real city centre, just blocks of buildings with wide streets between them.
  - kurthr 8y ago
    The city isn't flat either... it has many hills in the middle that are 10-12% grade and a few at around 30%.
  - trustfundbaby 8y ago
    Most American cities do have a city center though ... which ones have you visited.
afroboy 8y ago
Where i live there is no why you find flat ground, if you drove a bike you spend most of your time up and go which is very exhausting and don't forget not everyone has special roads for bikes.

picsao 8y ago

My personal assumption is that all that comes close to the rush of the animal hunting experience rewires a part of the brain.

benj111 8y ago

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'?

mrob 8y ago
>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.
- benj111 8y ago
  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 actually shooting at new recruits while training them would lead to effective training, but we could try it :).
  - toast0 8y ago
    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.
lexicality 8y ago

Jetroid 8y ago

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.

heavenlyblue 8y ago
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.
- jxi 8y ago
  Would that mean that the main thing you actually learn is confidence? Your brain knows that you were able to do this before, so it makes you behave physically in such a way that you assume you'll succeed (which ends up helping you succeed) even though really you don't have the muscle/technique memories anymore.
- Andrex 8y ago
  Swimming uses more muscles and requires more concentration. I had a large amount of form degradation when I took a years' break swimming, and it took a few weeks to get back in form. I was noticeably faster after I regained my form -- I'm not sure what the equivalent would be on a bike, since theoretically I would just need to pedal faster (requiring more raw strength, not form.) I don't think there's much comparison to the bike example in the OP.

bambax 8y ago

> 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.

jusssi 8y ago
Add a little song and dance around the narrative. It's ridiculous how well I can still remember many of the kids' songs and poems, even though I have little recollection of anything else left from that time.
Smaug123 8y ago
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.

mrfusion 8y ago

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?

cribbles 8y ago
I spent a lot of time writing TI-BASIC and PHP/MySQL when I was about 11-13. Stopped programming in any serious capacity for about a decade. 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.

dsego 8y ago

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.

k__ 8y ago

Probably depends on how much practice you had back in the days. 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.

tylergetsay 8y ago

This also works for a unicycle. It took me over a year to learn how to ride when I was a kid, as an adult I can still do it. My mother also learned as a child and was able to do it again as an adult. In my experience, there is a weird difference in the type of balance. I know how to hold my chest/core to stay up straight, but my unconscious ability to hold that stable isn't the same. Hence I wobbled a bit more, but I didn't fall.

chmod775 8y ago

Because the main "skill" to riding a bike is actually overcoming your fear that it'll tip over. A bike is naturally stable while moving and your body's natural sense of balance will do the rest. 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).

mxfh 8y ago
I think it the same thing riding bike isn't intrinsically hard to learn, it's about confidence and overcoming fear a lot too. Same goes for downhill skiing, havent done it in years, but would not hesitate.
- deleted 8y ago
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victor106 8y ago

From the excellent smartereverday youtube channel https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0 https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0 Strongly recommend to watch the above video.He does an experiment on how long it takes to get comfortable by changing the handle bars.

rossdavidh 8y ago

My wife knew how to ride a bike as a child, and now does not know how, and BOY does it get her angry if someone says you never forget.

scarface74 8y ago

I have a slight physical impairment that makes it harder (but not impossible) to do things that require coordination - like riding a bike and swimming. I had to learn to adapt. Last year I rode a bike for the first time in over 25 years and I struggled with balance and coordination. It would take me at least a week to remember. I also have to concentrate on my form to swim. If I was dropped in a pool, I could swim back but it would take me awhile to remember my proper form so so I wouldn’t favor one side over the other. I was also a fitness instructor for a little over 10 years, and stopped about 6 years ago because of $life. I remembered some of my old step routines, but I struggled trying to get all my body parts to work together again to do it. There are a few things that I physical can do, but it takes me a lot longer and a lot more practice to get it.

someearth 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8

black-tea 8y ago

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.

Sharlin 8y ago
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.
- barbarr 8y ago
  On the contrary, I used to cycle often when I was around 10 or so, and then never cycled when I was older. Then, when I was 21, I needed to use a bike to travel around work, but it turned out for some reason I had completely forgotten how to ride and had to pick up the skill anew. It's still a mystery to me how I completely forgot the skill and had to relearn it.
jplayer01 8y ago
> 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?
aaronmdjones 8y ago
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.

sorokod 8y ago

Perhaps it is not that difficult to learn how to ride a bike as an adult and lack of previous experience is hard to measure.

sys_64738 8y ago

Just like we don't forget how to drive a car. It becomes instinctive.

RandomGuyDTB 8y ago

I've learned how to ride a bike twice and I've forgotten it twice - I still don't quite believe people "never forget" how to ride a bike (given a long enough time).

aristophenes 8y ago

Two unique things about bikes is that it is harder the slower you go, and it uses a skill, balance, that we practice every day as we stand and walk. When you are a child, afraid of falling, with no experience, you want to go very slow. And that is the hardest way to ride a bike. As you increase speed it wants to stay more stable (on a flat surface). Just the knowledge that you have done it before, that it is an easy thing, means that in the first second you are accelerating to a speed where it is in fact easy to ride a bike. I don't think that particular example is as much about skill as it is about confidence. Frankly, the experience "you don't forget how to ride a bike" was true for me the very first time I rode a bike. My mom was holding on to the bike, then we moved faster, then a few seconds later I realized my mom had stopped behind me and I had been doing it on my own. We just had reached a speed where that became easy. And then the trick was not panicking ;)

ncmncm 8y ago

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.

pier25 8y ago

But why do we seem to forget more complex stuff like playing the piano which is also procedural?