Publish at August 19 2019 Updated March 18 2026
One of Destin Sandlin's mechanic friends wanted to have a bit of fun with his engineer friend; he reversed the direction of rotation of a bicycle's handlebars: when you turned the handlebars of his modified bicycle, the steering went in the opposite direction. He wanted to observe how long it would take him to adapt his riding style.
After a few tries, Destin was astonished to find that he was totally unable to master this machine, having ridden a bicycle since the age of 6 and being quite physically adept... why was he unable to change his way of operating?
In the course of his lectures and demonstrations with this modified bicycle, he was able to generalize: nobody can do it spontaneously, least of all those who "know" how to ride a bike. He offered $200 to anyone who could ride 3 meters (10 feet) without setting foot on the ground. He still has his $200 with him.
Learning to ride a bike takes a few hours of practice. We don't need anyone to tell us if it's right or wrong. Reinforcements towards the right actions are automatic.
After a few hours of activity, the integration of sensations and motor commands is complete. The skills needed to find and maintain balance while steering the bike in the desired direction are acquired and constantly reinforced until we don't even have to think about it. Great... but this powerful reinforcement has apparently generated neural pathways so deep that it becomes difficult to change anything, no matter how hard you want to.
After 8 months, 5 minutes of practice a day, Destin suddenly mastered the machine. Not gradually: yesterday he couldn't, today he can, as if something had connected in an instant. Of course, he could easily lose concentration and revert to his old automatisms, but at least he managed. Within a few hours, as his positive experiences accumulated, he became more and more confident, eventually achieving the same level of control as on a normal bike.
His 6-year-old son learned to control the bike much faster than he did, leading us to suspect that children apparently have more "neuro-plasticity". But that wasn't the end of his discoveries...
When he wanted to start riding a normal bike again, he was surprised to discover that he had become incapable of doing so... after 20 minutes, the same kind of click happened as when he had succeeded the first time: suddenly, he had regained the right reflexes and was regaining his initial skill.
His fundamental conclusion is that we experience the world through perceptual biases and behaviors that are as much physical as they are mental. We see certain frequencies, hear certain sounds, are sensitive to certain signals that we think are universal, but which in fact are not universal at all, even if we have fully integrated them.
His experiment shows that, when necessary, we can change our minds with effort and perseverance.
If your ideas and assumptions are inappropriate to the context, you run the risk of finding yourself marginalized, like newly-arrived immigrants in a new country: it's hard to unlearn many habits and conventions that you've become accustomed to, but which no longer make sense. Like arriving in Amsterdam and knowing how to ride an inverted bike, where no such bike exists.
So you need positive reinforcement to change, lots and lots of powerful reinforcement towards success. It's not falling off the bike or being teased that makes you learn, but the time spent balancing and moving in the direction you want to go.
We've been working on integrating new technologies into education for over 25 years now, and we're still at it with artificial intelligence. This integration remains laborious and often superficial, for many good reasons.
When the context changes, changing pedagogical methods and "educational algorithms", built and developed over decades and integrating a good number of implicit or pre-suppositions, both material and behavioral, requires effort and perseverance on the part of teachers and students alike. At a certain point, something clicks, but it's neither gradual nor predictable, and if we persevere, it's inevitable.
Let's be persistent... and demanding.
The Backwards Brain Bicycle - Smarter Every Day 133
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