what is it about riding a bicycle that people never forget how?
In: Biology
It’s like construction. Lots of traffic (information) traveling along the ‘everything you need to know to ride a bike’ path. Path becomes dirt road (increased grey and white matter). Dirt road becomes paved road. Paved road becomes highway (semi-permanent).
Physics makes riding a bike EASY. It’s 95% confidence. You push hard enough on the pedals, the bike is riding you.
It’s a learned motor skill that, once mastered, becomes a procedural and almost entirely automatic process that we don’t need to consciously control. It’s very hard to truly forget a procedural memory.
Actually, I think you can… kinda.
[Check out this video](https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0), where a guy and his child son both learn how to ride a bike with backward steering.
He keeps referring to having to first ‘unlearn’ how to ride a regular bike.
After he’s able to finally backward-steer, he then tries to go back to a bike with regular steering. He has a really hard time going back to regular, really comical scene of him trying.
Before anyone answers, they really need to watch Destin:
I’m pretty sure 90% of the difficulty of riding a bike is the confidence to move forward at a decent pace and the knowledge that gently leaning is a safer way to turn than jerking the handlebars around. Those things are hard to get your brain to realize without falling over a bunch, but once you’ve got them, you can probably re-learn them in a second so it’s like you never forgot.
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