Motorcycles are Awful at First
The first surprise about motorcycles is that they are awful.
Not in the movies. Not in the fantasy.
In real life. At the beginning. In the parking lot.
They’re hot, heavy, unstable, embarrassing, and constantly threatening to turn one tiny clutch mistake into a medical event.
And then something strange happens.
You get up to speed.
The physics changes. The bike lightens. It wakes up.
And suddenly the awful machine becomes magic.
That was the mystery that eventually became Motorcycle Mind.
So, how did I end up writing a book about motorcycles? I’m a math PhD who has concentrated on understanding design and evolution in biology, brain and culture, with six previous books about my discoveries, and none about motorcycles!
Well I, too, had spent decades passing parked motorcycles, gawking in awe and feeling unworthy. So, when a friend signed up for a motorcycle course and asked if I’d like to join, I jumped at the chance. It had always been something I wanted to do, but while raising kids it had never seemed the right time. My kids were now nearly grown, and I was ready to earn the privilege of lifting Thor’s Hammer and thereby earning an occasional diversion, a romantic ride with my wife at my back, the wind in our hair, going fast. What’s not to like? Motorcycling surely would be fun
.
But the course was not fun.
No air conditioning: It was summer and we were required to wear leather jackets, thick jeans, gloves, and a helmet. We trained six hours a day for two days on a sun-baked parking lot, moving so slowly there was never a breeze.
Manual transmission: I have driven manual transmission cars my whole life, but manual for a motorcycle brings unique challenges. First, everything is in the wrong place: the clutch at my left hand squeeze rather than my left foot press, the gear shift at my left foot rather than right hand, the accelerator (throttle) at my right hand rotation rather than right foot press, and the brakes at my right hand and right foot. At every moment I was struggling not to accidentally let up on the clutch and rocket across the lot, up the embankment and onto Interstate 71 into the path of the constant truck traffic. Second, dealing with parking-lot speeds in a manual transmission requires being in the “friction zone” where you must hold the clutch part way in and balance the throttle so as to achieve just the right slow speed for the task at hand. This is something anyone who drives manual transmission cars understands, but because a motorcycle’s engine is so strong relative to the overall weight of the bike, a failure to get just the right balance leads to much exaggerated sputtering and rocking compared to when in a car.
Slow speeds: Parking-lot speed is slow, and a key thing to know about motorcycles is that their magic only emerges once you’re moving beyond parking lot speeds. With speed the physics changes and the bike lightens, waking from its slumber it becomes stable, coordinated, yet supple and reactive to the barest of touches. Utterly and magically weightless, it flies. But at slow speeds motorcycles are unstable, wonky and ungovernable. At slow speeds motorcycles suck.
Sharp turns without putting a foot down: Every motorcycle course inevitably requires that you practice super tight right angle turns between cones without ever putting a foot down. It’s a cute parlor trick, and riders eventually get good at it, but there’s rarely a need. Although, living the last couple years in Miami, which floods a lot, I actually do fairly often have to drive very slowly, and sometimes turn, without putting my feet down. The water is so high at times I drive with my feet way up in the air!
Parking lot: And, needless to say, nothing could be less thrilling than riding in an empty parking lot; practically no optic flow, no obstacles, no city, no country roads, no risks.
So, there we were in the sweltering heat on our oppressively heavy bikes enjoying only our exposure to the risks of humiliation and injury, all on the promise that later — much later — this will totally be a cool thing to do. Because it was assuredly not cool then. If motorcycles were summarized by our experiences during a motorcycle course, there’d be no cult of cool about motorcycles. If books were written about them, they’d be satire. All the cool of motorcycles is bled out into the black top smattered with cheap orange cones. No mojo. It’s a wonder we bothered ourselves to continue riding after that. One in our class of ten dropped out. Wasn’t his thing. Perhaps it was the uncomfortable lameness of the parking lot rides that convinced him.
Luckily I was still motivated to keep on keeping on. With my course under my belt I began riding in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived at the time. I avoided highways at first, and began taking my bike, a 950cc 2019 Yamaha Bolt, a cruiser, to the gym every day. Looking back, I rode poorly and am amazed I never had an accident or even set the bike down. In the first months I remember thinking I was really moving, and then some more experienced rider would buzz by and I’d wonder how that speed — which I’d now view as unremarkable — on that road in those conditions was even possible. It didn’t take long to get comfortable; in a few months I found highways less menacing, and began to take them rather than the long way.
After about two years my wife and I moved to Miami, and my experience level — and joy — skyrocketed. We quickly realized our cars were a handicap in the heart of the city, and sold them. The motorcycle was enough. And so I rode pretty much every day, all year round. Not only was I getting an explosion of riding time compared to before, but the Miami road habitat is an altogether different animal, filled with impatient cars and swarms of scooters of all kinds. And in Miami we lane split, i.e., ride around and in between lines of cars, whether they’re waiting at a light or moving. No, lane splitting is not legal like it is in California, but — ahem — it’s tolerated. Point being, when you’re lane-splitting through Miami traffic an hour or so a day, you get good real quick!
At the start, my wife would cry from behind me, “Don’t try going through that gap! Too small! Slow down!” But after a few months, if the gap and timing was even theoretically possible I would get an ear full about why I wasn’t already through it and on our way. I became a whole new level of good. Still not like the riders who grew up on dirt bikes and can do pirouettes while they wheelie, but I had become one with the bike. I had even become one with the bike+wife!
Unlike the excruciatingly bad parking lot experience, actually being an experienced motorcyclist driving fast on real roads amongst real traffic is… awesome! For those non-rider readers, it is difficult to relate to you the full extent to which the motorcycle experience goes way WAY beyond the car experience, but your love of bicycles relative to pedal cars does go some way toward that, as we discussed earlier. But only part way.
And that’s why I wrote this book! To carefully describe what exactly the experience is, and to explain why it “works,” i.e., to explain why we like it. You see, the thing about me is that I’m a cognitive scientist, and one of my weird areas of expertise, such as it is, is on making sense of the human experience. Why we see illusions, why we see in color, why our eyes face forward, why we have emotional expressions. That sort of thing.
And, even weirder, I have focused on how culture creates “machinery” — evolves it — to fit our brains and bodies. These “machines” are sometimes not physical machines at all. They are “software” that harnesses us, like writing, language, music and the arts. For example, I have argued that we can read only because writing culturally evolved to “look like nature,” i.e., to look like the contour conglomerations that are found in natural scenes, thereby harnessing our visual object recognition systems for reading. See my books Vision Revolution, Harnessed, On the Origin of Art, and Human 3.0.
While that’s an example of cultural “software” that harnesses our brain mechanisms, cultural evolution also creates physical artifacts that harness us, whether it’s more optimally designed clothing, glasses, watches, sports equipment, chairs, video game consoles…
…and motorcycles.
When a technology finds its hold within human culture, it’s always because it has come to find via cultural selection some sweet spot in the way it plugs in to human brains, bodies, and groups. This book is the story about in what ways motorcycles have culturally evolved to fit us.
[This is an excerpt from Motorcycle Mind: The Secrets Behind the Coolest Invention Ever]