A rocket scientist shows that riding a reversed-steering bicycle is brain surgery… ;-)

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Curtis Olson April 25, 2015 21:54

Wow, fascinating!  That’s the same guy from the chicken head stabilization video!  Random trivia … when I was a kid I learned how to ride a normal bike sitting backwards on it (sitting on the handlebars facing backwards).  That took some practice … kind of like learning to ride a bike all over again as another new skill, but nothing like trying to reverse your existing  pathways an unlearn something so deeply entrenched in everything you do.

Darren Hart April 25, 2015 22:01

That was fantastic! +Randy W dunno why, but this made me think of you.

Andrea C G Mennucci April 26, 2015 02:59

you should have crossed you arms : right hand on left bar, left hand on right bar. Easy as piece of cake

Michael K Johnson April 26, 2015 07:44

+Andrea C G Mennucci is this assertion from personal experience?

Michael K Johnson April 26, 2015 08:10

+Andrea C G Mennucci I’ll be clearer: if your assertion were generally true, then it should be approximately equivalently difficult to ride a normal bicycle using one hand on the wrong side, which does not match my childhood experience (it wasn’t a difficult trick to learn). The video asserts that yours was a common assumption that never worked in practice; since you don’t address that assertion in your comment, I have to assume that you are commenting on the video without bothering to watch it; a regrettably common practice.

If your hand-crossing trick worked for you in practice, you may have proprioception problems—do you have difficulty knowing where your limbs are when your eyes are closed?

Curtis Olson April 26, 2015 08:14

I showed this video to my wife (who rarely is interested in geeky stuff)

and she thought it was fascinating! There was a guy taking the challenge

in the video that did try to reverse his arms and it didn’t seem to be

helping him too much. Whatever it is, it is fascinating. :-)

Ed Bailey April 26, 2015 08:37

Great video – watching his son learn it so much more quickly really is a visual illustration of neural plasticity at work.  Fascinating!

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