Focus in the body, O’Angel

Here’s an interesting video –
http://www.dailyliked.net/backwards-brain-bicycle/

This guy has made two modifications to a normal bicycle.

First, he has put gearing on the handlebars which replaces the usual direct drive.

Second, he has reversed the gears so a turn left on the handlebars sends the front wheel right and vice versa.

And he then shows that your casual punter can’t ride this bike very well, or at all.

In fact it took 8 months for he himself to learn how to ride it.

He claims that this process first required that he ‘unlearn’ how to ride a normal bike.

In fact the show is a bit of cheat because the thing that makes it so hard is the gearing ratio on the handlebar not the left-right thing.

Even if the wheel and handlebars turned the same way, anything higher than a 1-1 gear ratio would confuse your standard rider to the point of over-correction and fail.

If you tightened that gear ratio up to 1-1 or even tighter, a little concentration would be all it takes to get going on this thing.

Even so, his point is made. It’s hard to be bilingual in the body unless you learn from an early age.

That is we can run and cycle but might not be able to learn two ways of cycling.

Well some people can – say someone that can ride a bicycle and a mono-cycle.

Still there is a point. Doing new things with the body takes concentration to start, and repetition to perfect. And doing other similar activities at the same time might make the learning all that much harder.

Plus you are going to have to fall off a little to accelerate the learning process.

Unless of course you put a Segway-like gyro in the wheel to keep it upright. Here’s a link to one – http://shop-us.jyrobike.com/

If you added a gyro wheel then you simply couldn’t fall.

You could then learn to steer the bike first and then slowly turn the gyros down to get used to the balance.

It wouldn’t take too long to pick it up.

Sometime I think that the body is only slow to learn because of our fear of falling.