
Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike? - Deinos
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-forget-how-to-ride-a-bike/
======
Jetroid
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
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.

~~~
Andrex
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.

~~~
stonecraftwolf
I agree. When I swam competitively taking even a week off was something you
could feel in the water. It might only add a second or two to your splits, but
you could definitely feel it. It was weirdly distressing, actually.

------
Fricken
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.

~~~
steve_adams_86
I came to love climbing as a sport partially because of what you're
describing. You could be able to deadlift 450lb, do 10 pull ups with 100lb
hanging off of your body, what have you, and still be an awful climber (like I
was) despite having so much grip and upper and lower body strength. It's all
about technique, and it takes years to nail it down. That feeling of
progression is a lot of fun and it isn't linear at all.

I love bouldering most because sometimes you can brute force problems,
sometimes you absolutely can't - you'll spend a few sessions trying to figure
out this one pain in the ass movement or hold, then one day... You've got it,
and you don't lose it. It's a ton of fun and I like to think it's actually
great for your body and mind. Sometimes it feels a bit like wall-yoga.

~~~
adrianN
Technique is super important. Female climbers obviously don't have the same
kind of strength as men, which is why they climb differently. That doesn't
mean that they're (much) worse than their male competitors.

~~~
Fricken
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 to send those climbs. I wonder how much
the disparity between top men and women climbers is accounted for by the size
of their respective talent pools. There's just so many more men out there
dedicated to climbing hard than women.

~~~
starbeast
>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 intellectual domains

>A popular explanation for the small number of women at the top level of
intellectually demanding activities from chess to science appeals to
biological differences in the intellectual abilities of men and women. An
alternative explanation is that the extreme values in a large sample are
likely to be greater than those in a small one. Although the performance of
the 100 best German male chess players is better than that of the 100 best
German women, we show that 96 per cent of the observed difference would be
expected given the much greater number of men who play chess. There is little
left for biological or cultural explanations to account for. In science, where
there are many more male than female participants, this statistical sampling
explanation, rather than differences in intellectual ability, may also be the
main reason why women are under-represented at the top end.

[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1659/1161](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1659/1161)

~~~
fjsolwmv
"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...](https://www.amazon.com/Math-Three-Seven-Mathematical-
Preschoolers/dp/082186873X)

~~~
jacobolus
> _There 's a classic book [..] 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)_

It is ridiculous to suggest based on a sample of 2 (!) siblings that the
sister’s precocity at drawing and storytelling and the brother’s greater
interest in patterns and numbers is generally representative of their gender.

------
FatalLogic
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.

~~~
laurieg
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.

~~~
AngryData
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.

------
VanillaCafe
> 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".

~~~
wtallis
> When I started riding again, I definitely felt unsteady for the first few
> days or weeks compared to my previous riding ability.

This can happen to frequent riders simply as a result of switching to a
different bike with different geometry from what you're used to. Eg. if you
normally ride a mountain bike with a fairly upright posture and suddenly
switch to a road bike with a low and narrow handlebars and toe overlap, or if
you raise your seat after being accustomed to keeping it very low.

~~~
fatnoah
I had a similar experience, but with cross-country skiing. I was an avid skier
from age 2 to 22. I raced in high school, spent every weekend out skiing
(skating and traditional), had no problems on any trail, no matter how steep
or difficult, etc.

In college, I took up downhill skiing. Twenty years later, I tried cross-
country skiing again and could barely stay upright! I went in with full
confidence and ended up shuffling around like a zombie on ice.

------
jonas21
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
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.

------
victor106
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.

------
baddox
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.

~~~
KineticLensman
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 my ability to turn at speed on steep slopes. I think
this was due to learned (and remembered) confidence as well as muscle memory,
in particular knowing that because a turn would work, a sudden increase in
speed didn't mean automatic disaster. I also learned to lean out of a turn
(i.e. down the mountain, the opposite of a turn on a bike) and this was also a
confidence thing that I didn't forget, and which turns safer still.
Unfortunately, my increasing confidence was offset by decreasing fitness so I
reached a plateau. That said, on my last couple of trips, I didn't fall once.
I never took a multi-year break to test the concept properly.

~~~
baddox
I’ve never skied, but it seems very similar to riding a bike in that you need
to make constant adjustments to maintain balance and avoid obstacles without
thinking consciously about every adjustment.

~~~
KineticLensman
Once you reach a certain level of experience, the mechanics of making a turn
become second nature and the degree of conscious active control depends more
on the type of slope. A well groomed piste is the equivalent of a freeway and
you spend more time checking the traffic (the other skiers) than looking at
the road. In contrast, (for me at least) a steep gully or a natural mogul
field [0] requires more active conscious thinking about when to turn.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogul_skiing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mogul_skiing)

------
chmod775
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
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.

------
Aaargh20318
“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.

~~~
j7ake
How flat is Netherlands compared to other countries?

~~~
mrob
It's flatter than average, but I think most people bringing up flatness are
non-cyclists. Regular cyclists know that wind speed is just as important, and
the Netherlands has higher wind speed than average. If you've never ridden
into a strong headwind you might not realize how much it slows you down.

~~~
kaybe
What always gets me is that you don't really feel a tailwind. Riding just
becomes so easy, and you'd think it's you, or your bike and the street are in
a good condition.. and then you try to turn around. A great metaphor in life
as well, really.

~~~
aidenn0
Yeah, I remember as a kid I covered 20 miles in under an hour and at first
thought that I had just gotten in way better shape. Then I rode back...

------
k__
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.

------
aristophenes
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 ;)

------
exabrial
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.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
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.

------
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.

------
scarface74
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.

------
benj111
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'?

~~~
lexicality
These memories are stored in the centre of the brain and thus presumably
evolved well before sentience.

Learning how to climb a tree or swim in a fast river are very important
survival skills and the ability to not forget them would give you an
advantage.

~~~
benj111
Good point. I'm having trouble imagining cave men taking swimming lessons but
yeah the mechanism seems to fit.

------
tylergetsay
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.

------
bambax
> _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.

~~~
Smaug123
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.

------
rossdavidh
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.

------
mrfusion
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
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.

------
someearth
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8)

------
sorokod
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.

------
hansthehorse
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.

~~~
Aaargh20318
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.

~~~
black-tea
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
pier25
But why do we seem to forget more complex stuff like playing the piano which
is also procedural?

------
sys_64738
Just like we don't forget how to drive a car. It becomes instinctive.

------
RandomGuyDTB
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).

------
black-tea
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
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
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.

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

------
dsego
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.

