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Authors: Robert Penn
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refuse to steer the way the bike is leaning; once this is grasped, the child will over-correct, yanking the handlebars to left and right, veering dramatically from side to side like a sailor on shore leave full of rum. In time, the steering adjustments become more subtle, and second nature.
If you restrain or lock the steering on a bicycle, you cannot ride it. If youâve ever got the front wheel of a bike stuck in a tram track, or off-road in a narrow rut, youâll know what I mean. In addition, a bicycle has to be moving forward to balance. Balancing a bicycle at rest â a manoeuvre known as a âtrack standâ â is difficult. The fixed-wheel riders you see at city traffic lights managing to balance their bikes without dabbing a foot down are only nominally at rest. With the front wheel set at an angle, they are minutely rolling the bicycle backwards and forwards. They are also showing off. I know. I used to do it.
For a year I became obsessed with not putting a foot down whenever I cycled in London. Being able to do a track stand at traffic lights was one of the skills required: anticipating lights and braking early, knowing when to run them on amber and intuiting the manoeuvres of motorists were also critical. I regularly usedto get from my flat in Paddington, north of Hyde Park, to the college in the City where I studied photo-journalism, without ever dabbing a foot down. That was easy: 4 miles â I knew the sequence of the lights at the major intersections and my route avoided main roads. More difficult was riding from Paddington to Camberwell, south of the River Thames, where my girlfriend lived. If I arrived and rode up the garden path, grinning like a fool, she knew Iâd done it. âYou make people who wonât walk on the cracks in the pavement look normal. You should seek help,â sheâd say. The relationship didnât last.
Even today, there is a small minority of adults who canât ride a bicycle, let alone pull a track stand: roughly 8 per cent of women and 1 per cent of men in Britain, according to a recent Transport for London survey. Apparently, most able-bodied adults can grasp the rudiments in one three-hour session. The best thing about learning to ride a bicycle, though, is that you will only have to do it once.
There is a neuroscientific explanation for why we never forget how to ride a bicycle. We have a type of nerve cell in our brain that controls the formation of memories for motor skills. Theyâre called âmolecular layer interneuronsâ. These nerve cells encode electrical signals leaving the cerebellum â the part of the brain that controls co-ordinated movement â into a language that can be stored as memory in other parts of the brain. Of course, our molecular layer interneurons donât only encode the skills required to ride a bicycle; they encode all motor skills, from crawling to skiing and from knitting to dancing the tango.
What this doesnât explain is why riding a bicycle has been singled out as the one shared experience that we reference to illustrate how something once learnt can be etched in the memory so distinctly that we take it to the grave. âItâs like riding a bikeâ â we say this about something we never forget how to do. Whynot the expression âlike rowing a boatâ, âlike using chopsticksâ or âlike doing breast strokeâ instead? For some reason, weâve chosen riding a bike as the benchmark motor skill by which our molecular layer interneurons may be judged. I donât know why. Iâm not sure if anyone does.
It may be to do with the relationship between the bicycle and childhood. As Iâve said, most of us now learn to ride a bike early in life, âbefore the dark hour of reason growsâ, as John Betjeman put it. Perhaps, in youth, the cerebellum sends out stronger electrical signals, which are in turn encoded very carefully and stored in a
If you restrain or lock the steering on a bicycle, you cannot ride it. If youâve ever got the front wheel of a bike stuck in a tram track, or off-road in a narrow rut, youâll know what I mean. In addition, a bicycle has to be moving forward to balance. Balancing a bicycle at rest â a manoeuvre known as a âtrack standâ â is difficult. The fixed-wheel riders you see at city traffic lights managing to balance their bikes without dabbing a foot down are only nominally at rest. With the front wheel set at an angle, they are minutely rolling the bicycle backwards and forwards. They are also showing off. I know. I used to do it.
For a year I became obsessed with not putting a foot down whenever I cycled in London. Being able to do a track stand at traffic lights was one of the skills required: anticipating lights and braking early, knowing when to run them on amber and intuiting the manoeuvres of motorists were also critical. I regularly usedto get from my flat in Paddington, north of Hyde Park, to the college in the City where I studied photo-journalism, without ever dabbing a foot down. That was easy: 4 miles â I knew the sequence of the lights at the major intersections and my route avoided main roads. More difficult was riding from Paddington to Camberwell, south of the River Thames, where my girlfriend lived. If I arrived and rode up the garden path, grinning like a fool, she knew Iâd done it. âYou make people who wonât walk on the cracks in the pavement look normal. You should seek help,â sheâd say. The relationship didnât last.
Even today, there is a small minority of adults who canât ride a bicycle, let alone pull a track stand: roughly 8 per cent of women and 1 per cent of men in Britain, according to a recent Transport for London survey. Apparently, most able-bodied adults can grasp the rudiments in one three-hour session. The best thing about learning to ride a bicycle, though, is that you will only have to do it once.
There is a neuroscientific explanation for why we never forget how to ride a bicycle. We have a type of nerve cell in our brain that controls the formation of memories for motor skills. Theyâre called âmolecular layer interneuronsâ. These nerve cells encode electrical signals leaving the cerebellum â the part of the brain that controls co-ordinated movement â into a language that can be stored as memory in other parts of the brain. Of course, our molecular layer interneurons donât only encode the skills required to ride a bicycle; they encode all motor skills, from crawling to skiing and from knitting to dancing the tango.
What this doesnât explain is why riding a bicycle has been singled out as the one shared experience that we reference to illustrate how something once learnt can be etched in the memory so distinctly that we take it to the grave. âItâs like riding a bikeâ â we say this about something we never forget how to do. Whynot the expression âlike rowing a boatâ, âlike using chopsticksâ or âlike doing breast strokeâ instead? For some reason, weâve chosen riding a bike as the benchmark motor skill by which our molecular layer interneurons may be judged. I donât know why. Iâm not sure if anyone does.
It may be to do with the relationship between the bicycle and childhood. As Iâve said, most of us now learn to ride a bike early in life, âbefore the dark hour of reason growsâ, as John Betjeman put it. Perhaps, in youth, the cerebellum sends out stronger electrical signals, which are in turn encoded very carefully and stored in a
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