Tag: psychology

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83. Using goals to defeat anxiety

The longer I’ve been involved in rider training, the more I have come to realise that a focus on the purely mechanical side of riding (the use of the brakes, the throttle, the gears, balance and steering etc) is more or less useless without a full understanding of how, where, when and why those skills should be used. In short, mechanical skills determine what a rider can do but mental skills determine what a rider will do — and whether they do it at the right time, for the right reason, in the right place. This thinking aligns with the use of outcome, performance and process goals from sports psychology and contemporary thinking on workload management, stress and attentional control. We just need to make it mainstream in riding and driving.

Using goals to defeat anxiety

Some time ago, a rider came online and posted a tale of woe about his regular commute. It was, it seemed, all going horribly wrong. After a couple of years of relatively trouble-free riding, he been badly scared by some near misses in the past few weeks and was seriously thinking of giving up biking altogether as “too dangerous”.

OK, so let’s ask a question. Is riding really dangerous? Well, if we simply look at the comparative figures for different modes of transport then riding a motorcycle is around 30 to 40 times more likely to end in a fatal crash than if we drive a car over the same distance.

However, in terms of how likely we are on an individual basis to be killed, then the risk is actually pretty low. For the last few years, the annual number of fatalities has hovered between 300 and 350. Still too many but given there are anything between one and two million active powered two-wheeler riders, the risk’s not that extreme. A bit of perspective always helps when it comes to risk.

But even so, it’s a good idea to tilt the odds somewhat to our side, and we can do that in a number of ways. Once more, I’m going to dip into Sports Psychology by talking about outcome goals, performance goals and process goals.

Our overall ‘outcome goal’ represents the big picture and in this case it’s to get to work and to return home again. Our ‘performance goal’ is how we’re going to achieve that and we might say it’s to maintain situational awareness and an effective risk management strategy over the whole of the ride. But how do we reach our performance goal? How do we break our journey down into manageable, bite-sized chunks?

Think about a batsman in cricket. His outcome goal is probably to help his team post a big score, and his performance goal might be to make one hundred runs. But stood at the crease when the bowling is good and it’s hard to stay in, let alone score runs, that goal’s a long way off. It’s easy for it to see impossibly far off, rather like getting home safely seemed to the worried rider.

How would the batsman cope with the pressure. One way is to set PROCESS GOALS. These are the small steps via interim goals we take to move step-by-step towards our performance and outcome goals. The batsman might decide first of all to survive until the first bowling change which brings on a weaker bowler. Having achieved that, he might decide that he will aim to stay put for the first ten overs. And having made it that far he might start to aim to score ten runs as his next goal. Then another ten. Then ten more. (If I’d known about this technique myself, my-best ever batting score in quite a few years of playing cricket might have exceeded 19!)

So how can we transfer that to riding? Well, if we’re on a regular ride which is getting on top of us, we can break it down into sections. Reaching the first major junction. Getting out of the 30 limit. Reaching the motorway. Getting off the motorway again. Negotiating the rural roads to get home. Whatever represents your own journey.

The important points are that process goals are entirely under our control and they break down a task that might appear overwhelming when view in toto, into smaller and much more achievable chunks where we can focus on specific aspects of each task – maybe negotiating a busy cross roads, dealing with a known slippery corner, finding our way around a complex roundabout. At each stage, we mentally reboot for the next section of the journey.

Viewed one at a time as individual tasks, an overwhelming outcome goal suddenly seem much more achievable.

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81. Developing “What IF…?” “…then THIS!” routines

Seeing a potential hazard is only the first step. To ride safely, we must pre-plan our response and rehearse it until it becomes automatic. The brain works best when it recognises patterns and has a ready-made response, allowing split-second reactions without freezing or overthinking, and dramatically reducing the risk of panic-driven mistakes. It’s not enough to notice danger; we must know exactly what to do, and have practised doing it, particularly when under stress when decision-making speed slows and cognitive load spikes. This is supported by research into dual-task interference and real-time hazard response. Cognitive psychology research supports this principle: hazard perception without a prepared response has limited protective value. This threat-response model explains why experienced riders consistently outperform novices; it’s not because they “see more” but because they know what to do when they see it. However, while planning responses is essential, riders must retain flexibility. Hazards rarely present identically each time.

This is another article that developed from my original ‘Spidy Sense’ tip, as I investigated how we respond to hazards and was incorporated into my paperback MIND over MOTORCYCLE, which you can purchase at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills.

Developing “What IF…?” “…then THIS!” routines

A fundamental part of the Survival Skills approach to riding is to develop an understanding of the risks of riding, and having a strategy to manage those risks. And an essential part of the approach is to have those strategies in mind when we detect a hazard. Here’s what I mean. Asking the “What if…?” question is a good start because we’re making some educated guesses about what will happen next.

But here’s the problem.

If we ask the “What if… the driver pulls out anyway?” question, we need to follow it up with an answer. Why? Because when things start to happen, it’s almost certainly too late to figure out the correct course of action. The situation changes very rapidly when we’re riding and we’ll almost certainly succumb to SURPRISE! and set off all the unwanted ‘Survival Reactions’ that Keith Code has talked about. We’ll freeze or we’ll panic. We need to know how we’re going to deal with the problem BEFORE we actually have to take emergency action.

I’ve talked about how we can apply sports psychology techniques to riding and this is another place they work. We need something akin to a ‘pre-shot routine’. A golf course, for example, is designed to set traps for the golfer. Bunkers are full of sand, greens slope, and the ball can vanish into water hazards and long grass. There are two ways to play hazards. We can try to get out of trouble after things go wrong. Or we can make pro-active compromises to the ideal shot that gives us the best chance of avoiding the obstacles.

That’s not too different from the road if we consider the road to be full of traps too. We too need a routine that applies a pro-active response to the next hazard once we’re aware of it. And here’s how. Asking the “What if…?” question is good, but we need to follow it with a statement about how we’ll then proceed; we extend the “What if…?” question to include a “Then this…!” answer.

Here’s a very simple example. We see a car waiting ahead of us, indicating and clearly ready to turn right into a side road on our nearside. “What if… the driver doesn’t see us and pulls across our path?”

It’s almost certainly too late to figure out the correct course of action if we wait until the car starts to move. Even if we have time (unlikely) we’ll almost certainly succumb to SURPRISE! and all the unwanted Survival Reactions that Keith Code has talked about. We need real answers in our heads, ready to apply to the problem BEFORE we actually have to take emergency action. Seeing a car about to turn across our path at a junction should trigger a veritable cascade of possible defensive responses – mirrors, reduction in speed, possibly a change of position, use of the lights and / or horn, preparing for a possible emergency stop, or getting ready for a swerve if we can see an escape route. Even, finally, if a collision is inevitable, Malcolm Palmer’s version of an ejector seat, the ‘jump’ routine.

Each and every one is a possible “Then this…!” response to the “What if… the car turns across me?” question. But none of them will be in the front of our minds unless we already understand that they are possible responses.

Here’s another example. Having seen a bend, “What if… it tightens up out of sight?” “Then this… we check mirrors because we may need to change speed or position, perhaps select a lower gear, ensure we don’t turn-in too early, and maybe even slow down mid-corner so we don’t run wide”. But if we’re to avoid a nasty SURPRISE! we have to be aware of our options and have them in our minds as we approach the corner.

In many cases the “What if…?” trigger event is a ‘visual cue’. We can use the colour and shape of road signs (which is why they are different shapes and colours), the presence or absence of vehicles in a junction or even the fact that we have a view or there’s a ‘vision blocker’ obscuring our line-of-sight. A hazard warning sign should trigger us to check mirrors and consider slowing down, whilst scanning harder for the specific hazard we’re being warned about. A vision blocker might prompt a change of speed and position, and readiness for an emergency stop.

Of course we can use other senses. “What if… we hear a siren?” “Then… start searching for the emergency vehicle!” What if… we smell diesel?” “Then… start scanning the surface for the tell-tale traces!” What if… we feel an unexpected vibration?” “Then… pull over and find out what’s wrong with the bike!”

The great thing about the “What if…?” “Then this…!” routine is that it IS a routine – and that means it is:

  • consistent

  • efficient

  • effective

  • easily repeated

Still struggling to see how extending the “What if…?” question with the “Then this…!” answer will benefit us?

How about the humble traffic light? We all know that red means stop, green means we can proceed if clear, but what about amber? It means we “should stop unless it would be dangerous to do so”. So how do we know if it would be dangerous or not? What dies dangerous mean in this context?

Well, it could mean being too close and / or too fast to brake without risking a locked wheel. Or it could mean that we’d put ourselves at risk from a following vehicle if we braked. So our third “What if…?” question is:

“What if… the lights change when we are right on top of them?” “Then we have to decide whether it’s safe to stop or safer to carry on!”

Generally speaking we don’t ride through red lights or stop at green lights unless we are completely distracted by another task. But even the best of us WILL cock-up when it changes to amber IF we haven’t already made a conscious assessment of the situation. How long has the light been green? Is it likely to change? How fast are we approaching, and how much space would we need to stop? What’s behind us?

If we haven’t asked those questions and got some answers, then getting the stop / go decision right is going to be guesswork.

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80. Cue : Response – learning to link what we see to how we react

This article came about because of questions about the original ‘Spidy Sense’ tip that investigated how we respond to hazards. I realised that the use of visual cues is absolutely fundamental to developing ‘situational awareness’ (and an integral part of my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses), and my increasing understanding of how they work together with a pre-learned but subconscious response also came from deeper research that eventually became incorporated into my MIND over MOTORCYCLE book, my first foray into publishing [which you can purchase at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills.]

The core message — that linking visual cues to pre-learned subconscious responses reduces cognitive load and improves hazard management — is essentially ‘pattern recognition + motor-program automation’ remains highly relevant. Modern cognitive science confirms automaticity frees conscious attention for higher-priority tasks. This is the principle behind much aircrew instruction. The discussion of mental overload, task shedding, and attention limits is aligned with current understanding of working memory and selective attention, and the examples of overload during complex overtakes and the benefits of automated responses to hazards accurately illustrate real-world application.

Cue : Response – learning to link what we see to how we react

In a previous tip, we looked at the concept of “Spidy Sense” and how riders develop an early warning system to danger – a vague sense that something isn’t quite right somewhere – and the roles played by the various parts of the brain in avoiding harm when riding. The problem is that the rider may not know what caused that sense of unease, and so won’t know what the correct response is. We looked how the Mid-brain filters incoming information and decides whether to route it for further processing in the real-time, thinking part of the brain – the Neo-cortex – or hand it over to the subconscious Reptilian brain, which deals with responses to the threat of harm by triggering our automatic panic ‘Fight or Flight’ modes which may result in our reacting in an unwanted response.

So it might seem that so long as our thinking brain is engaged, all will be well. After all, that’s the basic concept behind the idea that if we ‘concentrate properly’ (something that crops up over and over in road safety theory and advanced riding guides), we’ll be able to cope effectively with riding hazards.

But there are two major problems.

The first is one we should really know about – human attention span. We can only concentrate on anything for short periods because our brains get tired. Twenty minutes or less is that adult attention span before our brain needs to switch gear. That’s why learning to ride and drive is so utterly exhausting. Unless we stop every ten or fifteen minutes to recharge the brain, the concept of ‘100% concentration’ is a faulty one.

The second issue is something I covered in a previous article. There’s not just a finite limit to the number of tasks that the thinking brain can handle at any one moment, but there’s active competition for the ‘channels’ that the brain uses in real-time. Any riding activity that takes up a lot of mental processing power will mean that other tasks – potentially important ones – are shed to free up attention for the most important task. This is what Keith Code is getting at when he talks about $10-worth of concentration in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books. Read my ‘workload’ article for more on this.

Here’s an example of the workload problem. Overtaking is a complex task. We need to search the road ahead for blind areas and junctions, watch the mirrors for vehicles attempting to overtake us, calculate how long it will take us to pass the slower vehicle and return to our side of the road, and we have to spot oncoming vehicles and work out their speed and distance, and decide if the ‘time-to-collision’ calculation allows us time to complete the pass safely.

If we’re on a dead straight road, with bare ground to either side, in fine conditions with good visibility, then the only really complicated bit is making sure we don’t pull out into the path of a vehicle approaching at a higher speed than we expected.

But what if the overtake is tricky? What if we’re trying to overtake a queue of slow-moving traffic behind a tractor, on a twisty road on a wet day with rain trickling down our visor? Now the task is considerably more complex. Guess what? We reach mental overload and begin to shed tasks. The one that goes missing most frequently, by my observation of other riders and recognising my own errors, is checking the mirrors.

So if we’re already saturated with information, how can we train ourselves to NOT to lose sight of important tasks like this? How can we process MORE information?

Well, the answer is that it can be done – aircrew have to learn to take in and process lots of information, and so do police drivers. Even riding instructors have to learn to ride safely for themselves, whilst monitoring what the trainee and other drivers are doing, plus anticipating what might happen, have a plan to cope… and at the same time as all that, we have to communicate with the trainee too! Training other riders is a much more complex task than the average rider realises.

But if we can up our game, so can a ‘normal’ rider.

The key is to learn to automate some of the less-complex tasks. Some riders – particularly those schooled in the idea that we need to concentrate 100% as we ride – have a problem with this idea that we can process information below the level of the real-time, conscious part of the brain, but we all learn just that technique – we just don’t realise it.

For example, how do we deal with traffic lights? When we first started using the roads, we all have to use our real-time, conscious brain. We look to see:

  • if there is a traffic signal at a junction

  • check what colour it is

  • remember what to do next

With a bit of practice, more and more of the task becomes automated. We simply ‘see’ the lights, and our response to a green or a red light is automatic.

What we’ve done is to learn to recognise ‘visual cues’ – the presence of the traffic signal itself, and the colour of the light, although it’s worth pointing out that many experienced riders still make a real-time decision when the light turns amber! And this automated system can break down completely when we go to France (where the light sequence is different) or the US (where the lights aren’t where we’d expect to find them). I rode straight through the first red light I encountered in the US because I wasn’t expecting it to be strung from a wire high above the road.

Another, more complex, visual task is performed by using a combination of peripheral vision and unconscious steering adjustments to steer the bike accurately within the lane. Once we’re out of the novice stage we don’t have to think about it, we just keep the bike on the tarmac. That works right up to the moment when there’s a difficult decision to make – which side of a pothole to ride, for example. We suddenly find our real-time, thinking brain is fired up to make that decision, because our subconscious system steering the bike down the lane decides it’s not got a routine to deal with the pothole.

Now, here’s the clever bit. We can train our brain to handle some of the essential visual search tasks via this subconscious subsystem. Road signs, particularly the triangular red and white hazard warning signs, provide information about hazards which we need as we ride, but searching for them consciously takes up a lot of processing power. So we do a bit of programming of the subconscious brain. All we have to do is ride the bike, and slow down a bit – because that frees up some processing power – then actively SEARCH for road signs. As soon we give ourselves this little bit of extra time, the signs start leaping out of the hedges at us. Try this out, and in a very short period indeed you’ll find that you no longer have to search for them, they simply appear in your consciousness. This is a technique I apply in my Survival Skills advanced motorcycle training courses and my trainees are usually astonished just how many road signs there are that they’d previously failed to spot.

Now, this is a big step forward but we can go one better. We can tie this ‘visual cue’ to trigger a response. Here’s what I mean. If we see a triangular warning sign telling us that there’s a junction ahead on the nearside, what might be appropriate responses? I’d suggest that a movement out towards the centre line (if safe) would be a good one. Covering the brakes is likely to be a smart move too. And we might also hold off on any acceleration too.

Well, here’s the good news. It’s entirely possible to automate those responses too. All we have to do is start by applying them as a thought-out response to seeing a junction on the left, and very quickly our brains learn that this is an appropriate response to the visual cue.

And now we have built the cue : response link. We see a side turning, and we automatically change position, get ready to brake and ensure we’re not carrying more speed into the danger zone. And having automated those responses, not only do we defeat the SURPRISE! mechanism that’s liable to trip the unplanned and unwanted ‘Survival Reactions’ identified by Keith Code, our conscious real-time attention is freed up to search for vehicles, to see whether we have a line of sight to the driver, and judge whether or not the driver is likely to turn into our path or not…

…and check for following vehicles. It’s amazing just how often mirror checks go missing in times of stress.

Hazard warning signs are particularly effective visual cues because of their distinctive shape and colour. Once catalogued in the subconscious brain’s database of important things, they will start to jump out of the background at us.

Whilst many of the cues are visual, there are cues we can hear (horns, engine noise) and smell (diesel or freshly-mown grass).

Remember – link the cue to a response. Freshly-mown grass means there might be a hedge-trimming tractor just round the bend, so we might have to slow down suddenly – losing some speed NOW would be a very good idea, as would being ready to take prompt evasive action, whilst not forgetting a mirror check.

Other cues I consciously practice spotting include dropped kerbs, broken white lines at the side of the road, gaps in hedges, direction signs and finger posts, traffic islands and islolated lamp posts. I’m sure you can guess where you’re likely to spot all these and just how I’ve trained myself to respond.

Having seen a waiting car in the junction, what kind of visual cues might set off a more significant response? How about:

  • not being able to see the driver

  • not being about to see the driver’s head behind the A pillar

  • the driver looking the other way

  • sudden left / right movements of the driver’s head

  • one hand taking up a different position on the wheel

  • the car visibly beginning to move forward

Here’s some really good news. None of this is difficult, and we can learn it quickly, as people who’ve taken my Survival Skills advanced riding courses will testify – just a few minutes working on this cue : response technique will show improvement out of all proportion to the effort put in.

But we also have to make the effort to keep the skills fresh by working on them for a few minutes every few now and again. The brain is a bit like a cluttered desk – what we use all the time is right at the front where we need it, but the bits and pieces you haven’t looked at for a while slide backwards. And what we haven’t used for ages has probably fallen clean off the back! Practicing regularly keeps techniques in the forefront of the mind. A good time to refresh is when we’re in no rush to get anywhere, or perhaps stuck on a road with a solid line for several miles. Drop back, open up some space and practice spotting visual cues and using the correct response.

It’s this cue : response pre-programming that allows us to move a significant step beyond ‘Spidy Sense’. By identifying then learning the specific cues that can be seen, it’s a relatively straightforward task to link them to a specific response to deal with the hazard.

All it needs is a little thought about the hazards we face, how we spot them, and what we do about them. And then some practice to gain – then KEEP – our subconscious defence mechanism functioning at a high level. Don’t take my word for it – after a two-day course Barbara Alam commented:

“I’ve got a lot better at that since doing your course. It really didn’t take more than a day or two of practice, with the occasional effort to “revise” by consciously doing it, to make it become an unconscious thing”.

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77. Visualisation – how to improve riding from an armchair

This was another article that pulled the concept of mental rehearsal — widely used in sports, aviation, and emergency services — into the realm of riding motorcycles well before its potential was recognised. Research shows that mental simulation activates many of the same neural pathways as actual physical practice, helping to consolidate procedural memory. Paired with structured, progressive practice and periodic mental review—what cognitive psychologists call “spaced repetition”—visualisation becomes a powerful tool to maintain and enhance riding skills, even from the comfort of an armchair. It bridges the gap between safe practice and unpredictable road conditions, preparing both brain and body for situations that cannot be safely replicated on the tarmac and overcomes the limitations of controlled drills which rarely replicate the surprise element of real-world hazards. The predictability of training vs. unpredictability of the road is a critical gap in rider preparedness.

Visualisation – how to improve riding from an armchair

In the last previous Spidy Sense article, I looked at how experience allows us to develop our red-alert Spidy Sense. But I’m going to describe an incident that happened when I was a basic trainer. At the time, the current two-part Module One / Module Two test was still a couple of years off, so the special exercises – including the emergency stop – were still tested on-road rather than off-road at the special sites adjacent to the test centre. One wet afternoon, the examiner came back early minus my test candidate – she’d crashed doing a real-life emergency stop. As we’d spent a lot of time working on this very skill, I dug into the research to try to gain a better understanding of how we react in an emergency. And what I unearthed was quite scary; the emergency stop we practice before the motorcycle test is almost entirely useless in terms of preparation for a real-world emergency. The basic concept was expanded in ‘MIND over MOTORCYCLE’, a book which you can purchase at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills]

Virtually everything I’ve talked about to date – and of course what I deliver on my practical advanced rider training courses – implies that we have to be actually out on two wheels to improve our riding. But step back a pace.

How do we develop skills for an event for which we CANNOT practice?

If the examiner returns minus trainee, there are several possibilities. The bike may have broken down, the trainee could have lost the examiner, or the test might have been abandoned. Or the bike’s been damaged – occasionally a low-speed topple-off on the U-turn would snap off a lever – I always had carried a spare for that reason. So when the instructor said my candidate had crashed and was unhurt, I wasn’t unduly worried until he told me she’d been trying to avoid a car that had pulled out of a junction and sped off.

“When the car pulled out, she locked the front wheel on the wet surface.”

The odd thing is”, he mused almost to himself, “we’d only just moved away after she made a perfect emergency stop for me.”

Over five days, Sue – my trainee – had performed at least fifty wet and dry emergency stops off-road during her training, and was perfectly competent at making controlled stops on the road too, because we’d practiced them there too.

I was puzzled too, and over the next few days, I wondered what had happened. Eventually, the reason for the crash became clear to me. It was a combination of WHERE the emergency stop is taught, and HOW the response was triggered:

WHERE – the e-stop is taught off-road in a safe environment

HOW – the instructor or examiner stands out of the way and signals the trainee to stop by raising an arm

So the first thing to note is that there’s no real emergency – it’s simply an exercise, a drill, that creates a repetitive ‘routine’. And the second point of note is that the instructor or examiner is giving the trainee a visual ‘cue’ to drop into that routine – ‘off the gas, on with the front brake, on with the rear, squeeze harder, etc.’ routine. It’s what they would have performed at least a couple of dozen times in the past. By the time the trainee met the examiner, that routine would be well-oiled.

And in fact, as the examiner explained, when my trainee responded to the examiner’s cue of a raised arm, she performed her routine and demonstrated a perfect wet road e-stop.

So what went wrong moments later?

The answer is simple. She might have mastered the TECHNIQUE. But she had no awareness of when she might need to use it. The real-life emergency that happened just a few seconds later came out of the blue and she was taken completely by SURPRISE!

Surprised, her careful “squeeze, don’t grab” technique deserted her. Insted of her learned drill, the threat of harm alerted the primitive reptilian brain, which took control of the situation, and responded with one of the ‘Survival Reactions’ I’ve talked about elsewhere. She grabbed a handful of front brake, and down bike and rider went.

If a freshly-trained rider who’s just performed a perfect e-stop on the same road cannot stop safely in a real emergency just a few metres away, then it’s small wonder that collision investigators often find that in the “Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You” SMIDSY collision, the bike could usually have stopped and it was the rider failed to deliver.

And think about the current emergency stop and swerve routines in the latest version of the test.

It removes even the tiny element of SURPRISE! that came from wondering just when the examiner might raise his or her arm.

Practiced in a safe environment around cones, where the rider aims past the speed trap radar, All the rider has to learn is to pass the trap at an appropriate speed, then stop or swerve in a reasonably brisk fashion.

No wonder we haven’t solved the SMIDSY problem!

So what could we do better? How could riders be trained to respond to an emergency that off-road training cannot reproduce?

We need to introduce ‘unpredictability’ into the training. Only half-jokingly, I suggested long ago that maybe instructors should pushing a hidden rubber car out into the trainee’s path.

A rather better answer would almost certainly be a simulator. Airline pilots learn to fly in simulators, and are put through all manner of training situations so they have an idea of what COULD happen before they’re out flying the plane and get into trouble. Increasingly, high-fidelity simulators are being used in research into driver and rider behaviour because it’s been realised that many of the earlier studies were unrealistic and “based on still photos, short video clips, or contrived on-road trials” as one research paper put it recently. We may not be able to afford a simulator with all the bells and whistles of an airliner, but even a cheap ‘three screens powered by a PC’ simulator would be a start. I first saw one demonstrated in the 90s. I’m still waiting for trainers to be offered the software to run on one.

So failing that, we can exploit a technique from Sports Psychology. It’s called ‘visualisation’ and it’s a way of using our own brain’s built-in simulator – we call it ‘imagination’.

All we have to do is close our eyes and imagine the scenario we want to learn the response to. Our imagination has the ability to fool the brain into thinking “I’ve been here before and this is what I did last time” and the more vivid and realistic our ‘experience’, the better the learning process.

Don’t just imagine seeing the car pull out and applying the brakes, ‘see’ the whole run-up to the emergency. ‘See’ the junction warning sign, spot the gap in the hedgerows, ‘feel’ the road surface under the wheels, and ‘hear’ the sound of the bike. Visualise the car at the junction. ‘Watch’ it starting to move and the look on the driver’s face as he spots us and stops in our path. If we also talk to ourselves by saying what we’re going to do to avoid the collision, and AT THE SAME TIME make the real-life muscle movements at our imaginary controls as we take our successful evasive action, the brain will memorise the events as if they were real.

And here’s the pay-off.

When we face the situation for real – EVEN THOUGH WE’VE NEVER BEEN IN THAT SITUATION – the brain will remember. It can recall the “been here, did this last time, and it worked” response.

Sports-people and other performers have used this technique for decades to avoid ‘choking’ on the big stage – the sprinter who’s used to running in front of a few hundred people suddenly in front of 100,000 people at the Olympics, the county cricketer making his test debut at Lords, the actor appearing in the West End for the first time.

On the bike, the ‘memory’ of our successful emergency stop prevents the primitive reptilian brain kicking in, taking control and grabbing that big handful of front brake. Practicing visualisation gives us a chance to respond to a real emergency with the same well-oiled response we’ve learned offroad in a safe and sterile environment.

But visualisation is not just for emergencies. Visualisation can help us recall and perform a sequence of steps in the order when stress means we we have a difficulty recalling some elements.

For example, there are a series of steps involved in performing a successful U-turn. Even off-road, trainees are often so focused on balance and moving off smoothly that they forget the all-important ‘look over the shoulder’. When a trainee had a problem, I used to get trainees to shut their eyes and do a mental run-through in their minds-eye. If they remembered this visualisation trick just before committing themselves to their once-only attempt on the bike test, they had a far better chance of successfully completing the exercise.

We can also use visualisation if we don’t ride so often. We can actively pre-program the brain by imagining going for a ride, thus mentally ‘rebooting’ ready for getting the bike out again.

And here’s a final point.

One of the biggest problems of any kind of learning is that we don’t retain much of it. In fact, a couple of weeks after training, we’ve forgotten most of what we learned. This is a psychological issue we’ve known about for over one hundred years. What makes training permanent is repetition. Each time, a little more becomes embedded. It’s not practical to expect trainees to keep coming back over and over to repeat training…

…but we can use visualisation to mentally repeat and review training to make sure it sticks.

So if you’ve completed a Survival Skills advanced rider training course, you should now have an idea just how you can review what was learned from the comfort of your own armchair – visualisation.

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76. What is ‘Spidey Sense’ and how do we develop it?

This is another article which pushed boundaries at the time I wrote it — and got a lot of push-back too — but the core concept that experienced riders developing a subconscious “sixth sense” through pattern recognition is very much valid. Modern research into situational awareness, threat perception, and tacit knowledge in driving and riding supports the idea that repeated experience trains the brain to detect subtle cues. The description of Reptilian / Mid-brain / Neo-cortex interactions has turned out to be a rather over-simplified model and neuroscience today sees the brain as far more interconnected than this triune model suggests, with threat detection and decision-making distributed across multiple networks, but it works well for communicating automatic vs. conscious responses to riders and in the context of helping riders understand their reactions, it remains a clear, accessible metaphor. Experienced riders develop Spidey Sense by building a large internal database of patterns, so potential hazards trigger an early warning before the threat becomes immediate. Coupled with proactive scanning and deliberate practice, this allows us to anticipate, prepare, and respond effectively, reducing reliance on panic reactions and improving overall situational awareness.

What is ‘Spidey Sense’ and how do we develop it?

If you’re anything of a fan, you’ll know that when the bad guys are around, Spider-Man gets a “tingle” from his ‘Spidey Sense’. And experienced riders will also report how they get a sixth sense that things aren’t quite right, so they slow down, look around, just before something unpleasant happens, and thank their lucky stars for the warning. When that happens, we’re developing a kind of biking Spidey Sense. As you have probably realised by now if you’ve read some of the other related articles, the design brief for our 200,000 year-old brain never included the ability to ride motorcycles, so we have to make considerable compromises to ride motorcycles. But what exactly is this ‘sixth sense’? A quick lesson on how our brains are put together will help.

One model of the brain is the so-called ‘triune’ brain, because it consists of three parts.

At the top is the ‘Thinking Cap’, the Neo-Cortex which the most modern and largest part of the brain. In very simplistic terms it’s where conscious thinking is performed and where our reasoning skills are centered.

At the bottom – it’s directly connected to the spinal cord – is the most primitive part of our brain. It’s sometimes called the ‘Reptilian Brain’ because we share it with crocodiles. Responsible for controlling many of the basic body functions, it’s also constantly on guard for danger. It’s blisteringly quick in responding – it needs to be if we’re to duck when someone hurls a rock at our head – but it doesn’t think. It only chooses the most basic fight or flight responses.

Sitting between the two and hard-wired to both is the Mid-brain. Here the Reticular Activating System works with the Limbic System to control attention. This part of the brain works completely below the level of our awareness and acts as a filter on incoming data, attempting to pick out parts with meaning. You’ll probably know how we can hear someone mentioning our name across a crowded room, and how that perks up our conscious attention. The same process goes on to filter relevant information from the vast amount of visual data sent to the brain by the eyes.

But in certain circumstances, the Mid-brain can also route data perceived as a potential threat straight to the Reptilian brain, which goes into automatic fight or flight mode. In biking terms, that’s usually manifested as a panic grab at the brakes, freezing completely and target fixation. Recognise those reactions? You should, because these are the ‘Survival Reactions’ that Keith Code identified in Twist of the Wrist some years ago.

With the proviso that to learn, we need to survive, we can learn from emergencies. We may do some reflective thinking after the event and come up with a better option – why controlled braking is better than a panic grab, for example.

But it seems that scary incidents are also subconsciously ‘logged’ and become embedded. As we continue to ride, what seems to happen is that the Mid-brain continues to process the incoming data – remember, this is happening below the level of consciousness – but increasingly compares it against a database of stored memories, trying to find a match. The more riding experience we have, the bigger the database of past experiences and the more likely the Mid-brain is to find a match. If the past event had unpleasant consequences, then a “things aren’t right” message gets sent to wake up the Neo-cortex. Just as hearing our name across the room flicks us into full-on attention, we’re suddenly on full alert with Spidy Sense triggered.

Of course, it’s not foolproof.

For starters, inexperienced riders don’t have much experience to call on. So in novel circumstances, there is nothing alarming enough to trigger the Mid-brain to wake up the Neo-Cortex. We ride, totally oblivious, into danger. Only when the threat of personal harm becomes obvious enough is control turned over to the Reptilian brain – and that’s when the panic responses kick in.

For a more experienced rider, there’s a second issue. Although we are now on high alert, we’re still only aware that things aren’t quite right. That may help us to take some pro-active action – slowing down is nearly always a good first step – but it’s no guarantee we’ll respond appropriately.

Worse, we may be out of time before we finally identify the source of our anxiety. Analyses of accidents and in the laboratory suggest that it can take us two to three seconds to consciously turn our attention towards a developing threat, to analyse the situation and figure out what’s happening, and come up with a solution. 200,000 years ago, that might have been acceptable, but on modern roads and travelling at a very modest 30mph, it’s an age. We’ve covered forty metres in three seconds. So out of time, the Mid-brain may hand over control to the Reptilian brain. We’re no better off than the novice rider who never saw the threat coming.

A partial solution is to create ‘muscle memory’ pathways to defeat the Survival Reactions. Despite the name, the links we build are really in the brain, but they do control muscles. For example we can learn to overcome the instinctive front brake grab when a car pulls out, or the frozen steering when we’re running wide on a corner, by ‘burning’ learned responses. And we do that by mastering, then regularly practising, techniques such as progressively squeezing the brakes and controlled swerves. The idea is that even when the Reptilian brain tries to take over, we don’t let it totally control our reactions.

But there’s one more thing to think about. The trigger for the Reptilian brain to kick in is often motion detection in our peripheral vision, which is incredibly sensitive to movement. If we suddenly detect movement close at hand, swerving the other way can save the day. But it’s essentially a ‘reactive’ response, after the problem has developed.

The clearly-focussed, colour cone of vision which allows us to see sharp detail is a very narrow, just a few degrees wide. If we only look at the road ahead of us, we won’t gain information about hazards left or right of our path. So we need to be PRO-ACTIVE with our observation, keeping our eyes moving so we are actively searching out potential hazards before they become bigger threats that tingle our Spidey Sense.

By developing ‘situational awareness’ we reduce the chances of having to rely on Spidey Sense too often. And then we give ourselves a MUCH better chance of avoiding triggering the Reptilian brain’s panic reactions. Find out how to develop situational awareness of a Survival Skills advanced motorcycle training course.

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73. Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

The “Ladder of Learning” framework is a classic from teaching, but aligns well with rider development. But modern riders have new tools such as on-bike cameras and performance-tracking apps to allow objective looks at how they cope with the roads and develop skill at braking and leaning. Focused sessions targeting one skill at a time—the Salami Principle—remain highly effective as does deliberately broadening experience. A fresh challenge can reignite development, but remember that skill is never ‘complete’; each plateau is just the level ground before the next climb.

Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

Riders can get stuck in their development. Some years back I took on a trainee who felt that his riding development had reached a plateau. He had several years of riding behind him after passing the bike test, and had starting on a course of advanced training. But after some initial improvement, the feedback being given to him after his observed rides wasn’t showing any further development. He knew there was more to learn – after all, that was what his observer was telling him – but his forward progress had stalled and he didn’t know why, nor how to resume forward development. His observer had been telling him he needed to develop some ‘gloss’ on his riding, but he felt he’d peaked. His enquiry email asked: “Is this kind of normal – learning a bit, levelling off for a while, learning a bit more, levelling off even more etc or am I right in thinking I’ll just never be better than I am now?” So here’s another question. Can we identify the barriers that stop our development in its tracks?

The first thing I’ll say is that ‘advanced’ training does not replace what we learned when we started out as a motorcyclist. The fact is that basic training teaches us 90% of the skills we’ll use 90% of the time. So post-test training supplements, but does not supplant, what would better be termed ‘core skills’. And if that’s the case, there should be a couple of obvious reasons for a levelling-off effect:

  • each new level of learning produces less-dramatic results because we’re increasingly ‘improving’ rather than ‘adding’ skills and knowledge- the improvements are ever more subtle

  • each new level of learning is usually harder work – we’ll only see results if we’re prepared to put in the effort and that may push us outside our comfort zone

Putting in the effort emphasises the need for practice. ‘PRACTICE makes PERMANENT’ (and not perfect). In other words, if we want ANY learning to stick, we need to keep going out and using what we learned. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a new language or riding a motorcycle round bends. It’s often LACK of practice that stalls development. It’s a point I make several times during one of my advanced motorcycle training courses, but I cannot make riders go out and practice.

Practice must also has to be targeted. Simply going out riding isn’t the answer, because it’s “the same day’s experience, experienced one thousand times”. We have to spend time working on what we learned.

So when progress has stalled, it may well be a failure to spend time working with the new skills.

Here’s something else to consider. Learning occurs in a series of sequential steps starting from the point where initially, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: This is ’16er with a CBT on a scoot’ syndrome – not enough experience and not enough knowledge to know what we need to know.

CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: after a while, we begin to recognise we have issues and that we don’t know how to deal with it. This is roughly the level the DVSA hazard perception test aims at – the ability to click a button when a car might cause a SMIDSY collision, but no understanding of how or why it happens is needed, nor any strategy to deal with the problem.

CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: maybe more experience or after training for a DVSA test pass, we’ve learning, but it’s still a ‘work-in-progress’ – we have to constantly remind ourselves to what to do. It’s good developmental stage, but it’s essentially still a ‘reactive’ one where we respond AFTER a hazard develops and prone to lapses where we forget.

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: ride long enough or take the short-cut of some post-test training and with a bit of luck our ability to read the road, analyse what we see, and respond to hazards has all become ‘proactive’ – we no longer have to think our way through problems, it’s become a smooth, well-practiced drill.

These four sequential steps are sometimes known as the ‘Ladder of Learning’.

The first two stages impose serious limitations on safety which is why basic training aims to push us straight into the third ‘conscious competence’ phase, and post-test training aims to take us beyond. The trouble is that learning is hard work. As we try out the new ideas or techniques, we’re consciously processing what we’re doing and using our real-time thinking brain in this way is exhausting. We simply can’t keep it up for long – it’s a real problem with day-long CBT training – and that can lead to two mistakes:

  1. trying too hard – just as with my own advanced coaching sessions, we’ll achieve far more from short practice sessions than by going out for long rides

  2. trying to do everything at once – tackle one thing at a time, it’s the way I teach riders and it’s the way I advise them to practice. I call it the Salami Principle. Why? Slices of salami eaten over time are delicious and digestible. But if we try to eat the whole thing at once, we’ll be sick. The same applies to skills – sliced up, we can practice and achieve the result we were looking for, attempt everything at once and we’ll be overwhelmed with the task.

And simply mastering any technique isn’t enough either. Longer term, we have to work to embed what we learned into our regular riding. Just ‘knowing’ what we should be doing isn’t enough. The moment I hear – as someone wrote on a forum recently – “I have to concentrate too hard when I’m riding advanced”, it means they haven’t worked at making the techniques so automatic that they have become an unconscious part of everyday riding technique. If we don’t USE it, we LOSE it.

What’s far less obvious is that once we get to the top of one particular ladder, we’ll be at the bottom of the next – there’s always something we don’t know. But of course we don’t know that. Another way our development can stall is if we only ever do the same riding with the same group of people or ride the same kinds of roads. With no new benchmarks, we’ll never discover if we need new skills – we’ll assume we’re good enough. If we want to continue to develop, we need to understand that the learning process doesn’t end.

So if we’re feeling comfortable with our riding, it could be time to push ourselves out of our comfort zone again, to head back to the level of conscious incompetence where we’re ready to learn new ideas and skills. And just possibly, a change of perspective is needed. Perhaps a Survival Skills advanced rider training course may be just the change you need to kick-start development again.

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72. Anger Management – dealing with road rage and red mist

This article explains the important distinction between red mist (self-induced risk-taking) and road rage (reaction to others) and the advice to recognise anger, avoid the victim mindset, and give control back to the reasoning part of the brain is entirely consistent with safety psychology. The core principle remains the same: control your response rather than the road, by anticipating situations that might provoke anger and giving our reasoning brain the opportunity to override instinctive reactions and avoid escalation.

Anger Management – dealing with road rage and red mist

From time to time I get asked if I have any solutions to what the issues known as ‘red mist’ and ‘road rage’. Of all the questions I’ve tried to answer, this one is probably the most difficult. Although my background is in science, I’m not a psychologist. Mostly what I’ve written here is what I know works for me on the occasions I feel myself getting a bit carried away with riding or acting aggressively if someone makes me angry. What I do know is the one thing we simply cannot do is let it take control. In particular, anger needs to be recognised for what it is – we are never far away from behaving like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. We never grow up, we just learn how to behave in public, yet there’s a limit to self-control. If we bottle anger up, it will simply build up until we ‘kick the dog’. Some unsuspecting and innocent party bears the brunt of OUR resentment.

First of all, we need to try to identify the problem. Whilst because ‘red mist’ and ‘road rage’ are both psychological states we might develop whilst riding, they are not the same.

Red mist is a state where we are no longer assessing risk realistically. Perhaps we begin to ride at higher speeds, pull off more overtakes, or corner with bigger lean angles than we would normally. Instead of this increasing our stress levels, as it would normally, we can actually get a ‘buzz’ from this kind of riding when everything seems to be ‘in tune’ and effortless. Maybe we begin to enjoy the thrill, maybe we start to justify our behaviour because we’re out to impress others – perhaps riding in a group, or even on an assessed ride. It’s a state that racers, and even professional drivers such as police or ambulance drivers can get fall into in pursuit of the ‘noble cause’ of responding to an emergency call. It’s something the professionals are warned about, but nobody tells the average rider how to look for the warning signs, we just get castigated when we fall into the trap.

Road Rage is a somewhat different psychological trap, and has been around since Daimler first stuck four wheels round an engine. If you want a classic literary example of a driver with road rage, think of Mr. Toad in “The Wind in the Willows”. Essentially, it’s aggressive behaviour around other road users, particularly when someone does something that irritates us, perhaps by impeding our progress. According to research on what annoys drivers, the main triggers for driver anger are:

  • tailgating

  • being cut up

  • inappropriate overtaking

  • undertaking on motorways

You’ll notice the word inappropriate. It’s nearly always a subjective view, where someone does something someone else doesn’t think they should have. Not too long ago, I was rounding a fairly gentle left-hander positioned around half-a-metre from the centre line when I spotted an oncoming car. I moved inward to the centre of the lane – a completely unhurried manoeuvre that in no way inconvenienced the driver coming the other way. Nevertheless, he found it necessary to swerve aggressively towards me, sound the horn and make rude gestures.

Road rage can be relatively low-level ‘shouty’ behaviour such as unnecessary flashes of headlights or use of the horn, or hand signals that aren’t to be found in the Highway Code so if we find ourselves doing those, it’s important to recognise what’s going on.

The problem is escalation. Hopefully we can shrug it off when others display that kind of behaviour towards us, but if we respond in kind, then the situation can rapidly move into aggressive tailgating, swerving towards other vehicles, or brake-testing the vehicle behind. Bikers have been known to kick cars or knock off mirrors, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the one who will come off worst in any argument of four wheels -vs- two is the rider.

Of course, our own view of what we just did is usually completely different. My position on the bend was – compared with a lot of advanced riders – rather restrained. I always aware that motorcyclists often appear impatient to other road users because of our ability to accelerate and overtake, or by taking up positions which a car driver finds inexplicable. Have a read of this:

“Aggressive drivers are careless drivers who want to get ahead of everyone on the road… [who] put their own convenience before anyone else’s safety. Other drivers may develop road rage, potentially violent anger, in response and retaliation to the violations they feel other drivers commit.”

Anybody here ride a bike because they think it allows them to make ‘better progress’ than “everyone else on the road”? Hmmm. We must never forget that when we share the roads, we are judged by everyone else’s standards of behaviour. What seems perfectly good and sensible riding to us may not appear that way to the driver we just passed or coming the other way. Simply because think we are a ‘better’ rider than they are a driver is not an adequate reason for ignoring what ‘the other fellow’ thinks about our riding.

So who’s right? The biker? Or the driver? If there IS an answer, it’s probably “neither of us”, but what I would say is that a really advanced piece of riding is not one that necessarily gains us ‘advantage’ but one that’s almost imperceptible to other drivers.

What really doesn’t help are smug statements like this next one:

“The truth is that no matter where you go, no matter how safe, careful, and considerate a driver you are, there is going to be someone on the road who is not. They’re going to challenge all the patience you have built up, possibly putting your life at risk… a road rager feels a certain degree of superiority over all other drivers on the road. They feel it is their duty to punish bad drivers and teach them “lessons”… their behaviour is equally selfish, immature, and dangerous.”

It’s positively complacent: “it’s not me that’s the problem, it’s everyone else”. This positively hinder our understanding. The fact is that road rage is not something ‘other people’ suffer from – anyone with a human brain is a potential road rager.

So, how do we keep ourselves under control when provoked? How do we detune ourselves when the buzz starts to get the better of us?

There are plenty of helpful-seeming articles online which usually start by saying something like:

“The best way to keep yourself from flying into an uncontrolled rage on the road is to remain calm and keep perspective. When someone does something you feel is careless or stupid on the road, you have to just let it go.”

Errrrr… but HOW??

I did some reading around the topic and it seems that at the most fundamental level, the issue is at least partly down to how the human brain has developed. The most primitive part of the brain, sometimes called the ‘reptilian brain’ because we share it with crocodiles, is designed for survival rather than reasoned thinking. It’s around 300 million years old and its basic programming is ‘react or die’. The first mammals with more advanced brains only appeared around 100 million years later, and the human brain which gives us our flexible reasoning capabilities is only around 200,000 years old. But even in our human brain, that primitive reptilian brain always on the alert and it cannot distinguish between a real threat demanding instant action and a scary surprise that turns out to be nothing significant when we have had a moment to think about it. Whenever we’re shocked, there’s a conflict as the ancient, hard-wired fight and flight response of our reptilian ancestors is pitted against the flexible reasoning responses of our ‘new’ human brain.

So when we react instinctively and without thinking – and sometimes violently – we’ve let the reptilian brain take control.

Now, if you’ve read any of my other writing on the so-called ‘survival reactions’ – the totally inappropriate reactions that kick in when we suffer SURPRISE! on the road, you may begin to see something of a connection.

Not only do we need to try to defuse our own responses when we feel provoked, but we need to understand how not to provoke road rage in others.

I’ve long stopped looking at the road as a place where everyone should “do the right thing” because I’ve learned the hard way that when a dangerous situation arises because someone does something wrong, that’s guaranteed to make me angry. And no-one using the roads is perfect. Not you and not me, and not even the most highly trained riders. We all make mistakes, and many of the dangerous situations really are the result of a simple error of judgement. There but for the grace of god, etc..

So I’ve learned to try to predict the situations where drivers could put me at risk – the classic SMIDSY near-miss is a good example – and to see it coming before it happens. If we’re expecting something to happen, our reasoning brain deals with the fall-out and won’t give the reptilian brain chance to take over – we’ll simply say to ourselves: “I saw that coming”.

And what if we’re the unlucky rider greeted with an inexplicable display of aggression by another road user, like that driver who didn’t like my cornering line? Maybe we were behaving in a predictable manner. Maybe we’ve just surprised them. Or perhaps we’re on the receiving end of some ‘second-hand anger’ after the previous rider triggered the response we just saw. It doesn’t make the driver’s aggression right, but it does make it a little more understandable. Try not to get riled.

Most importantly we need to get out of the ‘victim mindset’ where we believe that all other drivers on the road are out to get us. They aren’t. Drivers are mostly relatively careful around motorcyclists – it’s just that our reptilian brain is far better at noticing the rare occasions when another road user puts us at risk than our reasoning brain is at spotting the far more common moments that drivers keep well clear of us.

If we do start to slip into red mist or aggression, we need to recognise it for what it is. We MUST acknowledge it. Only then will the reasoning area of the brain re-establish control, and decide what, if anything, we are going to do about it. But don’t ignore red mist or anger. Once we realise we’re not acting like a grown-up, breath deeply, count to ten, think it over and move forward.

And if I had to sum up my advice in one phrase? It would be:

“Start looking for the positive on the roads, tune out the negative.”

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67. SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

Even if rider training still focuses on ‘perfect performance’ to avoid errors, it’s increasingly recognised in other fields where safety is paramount — such as in airline pilot training — that skill alone won’t prevent in-flight errors, and that the ‘startle effect’ — what I refer to as SURPRISE! — is the key trigger that overwhelms even highly experienced pilots. The same applies to riding. It’s rare we outride the motorcycle. Most crashes result when our instinctive ‘Survival Reactions’ take over. Key points like the rarity of crashes and the influence of optimism bias should become fundamental concepts in rider training. Even with advanced ABS, traction control, or stability aids, anticipating the unexpected and preparing a mental and physical response remains the most effective defence against SURPRISE!

SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

There are only two things we can do on a bike – change speed or change direction. To do that, we use the same inputs – accelerating, steering or braking – every moment we ride. Accident investigators around the world find the same things when they look at bike accidents. Nearly always, the bike wasn’t at its limits; if the rider had applied the correct inputs into the machine, they’d have got out of trouble. The traditional view has been that riders make errors because they either lack skills or they make the wrong decisions. It’s easy to say “don’t make errors”, and the conventional view of road safety has always been that ‘all’ we have to do is avoid errors, then everyone would be safe on the roads. So training has always proceeded along those lines – years ago, I was told that if I “observed, anticipated and concentrated” I wouldn’t crash. Guess what? I crashed. So the big questions are these: “if the machine inputs necessary are only an extension of what we do as a matter of course, and if the errors are recoverable, why do we continue to crash?” The implication is that crashing is rather more complex than we think, and it’s worth asking “how do we know how to avoid an error, if we don’t understand it in the first place?”. But does anyone teach us about crashing? Read on…

After a crash, it’s easy to ‘walk backwards’ along the sequence of events and to produce a timeline of events. Eventually we appear to come to the precipitating error:

  1. we left the road in a bend…

  2. because we were off-line…

  3. because we turned in too early…

  4. because we ran in too fast…

  5. because we braked too late…

  6. because we had no margin for error…

  7. because we misjudged the bend!.

Such a crash is likely to be explained as ‘too fast for the conditions’.

Is that really correct? Let’s go back to the beginning and start again, this time trying to understand WHY rather than WHAT went wrong. Are we saying the corner was too fast for the bike? Or too fast for the rider? In a serious crash investigation, it nearly always turns out that the bike could have got the rider out of trouble. So it’s not machine limitations, but ‘rider error’. If we stop there, the finger is usually pointed in the direction of the rider’s level of skill and judgement and the assumption is that if the rider had better skills, the crash wouldn’t happen.

Now, let’s take another step backwards beyond where the rider left the road, to consider something nearly always overlooked. How did the rider get to the corner where he or she crashed? They had to ride there. And that means the rider successfully negotiated every PREVIOUS corner, to reach the one that he or she crashed on.

So if the problem really was riding “too fast” or “lacking skill and judgement”, how did they get as far as they did? Wouldn’t they have crashed sooner? We know that statistically a crash is a relatively rare event, even for relative novices. So whilst it IS possible it was blind luck that the rider got this far, it’s far more likely that there were some unique circumstances about this particular corner that caused the crash HERE rather than somewhere else. In short, the corner somehow set a trap that the unsuspecting rider fell into.

Whilst we can point to a lack of skill or a poor attitude to riding as loading the dice towards crashing, it’s not just new or badly-behaved riders who crash. Those groups might be at higher risk, but crashes don’t happen exclusively to the high risk groups. The majority of crashes actually happen to ‘ordinary’ riders doing ‘ordinary’ things. Moreover, even expert riders crash, and they often have the same ‘standard’ crashes that the higher risk groups do – at junctions, when overtaking and on corners.

So if experience, skill and even a controlled approach to riding only reduces risk but doesn’t eliminate it, it should be pretty clear that something rather more complicated is going on. And here’s where we can turn to the work of US rider coach Keith Code. He realised that even good track riders crashed and noticed that in many of these crashes, the rider COULD have got out of trouble. But when things started going wrong, these riders didn’t respond as expected. Instead, Code identified a string of inappropriate reactions including ineffective and frozen steering, over- and under-braking errors, and target fixation. He concluded that it was these errors that caused most track crashes. He called them ‘Survival Reactions’.

You should be able to see the parallel with accident investigations on the road. The bike COULD have got the rider out of trouble, but like the track rider, the road rider also froze, over-reacted and target fixated into the crash.

Next backwards step. If it’s these ‘Survival Reactions’ that dump us on our backside, why DO we react inappropriately in some places and not others? What triggers the ‘Survival Reactions’? Code put it down to the threat of personal harm, because the moment we’re afraid of something we’re likely to revert to instinct. Instinct, being based on the most primitive part of the brain, rarely provides the right response when riding a bike and our trained responses, everything we’ve learned, goes straight out of the window.

So far, so good, but there’s another pace backwards we can take, by asking “what triggers that fear of personal harm?” Factors acting a ‘stressors’ – that is, making us tense and anxious – such as riding on a road that technically trickier than we’re used to or riding with buddies quicker than us – appear to make us more prone to making a mistake, but don’t seem to explictly trigger Code’s ‘Survival Reactions’.

The trigger appears to be SURPRISE! It’s SURPRISE! that overwhelms our learned behaviour and kicks in the in-built instinctual responses to a threat. The bend tightens. We’re suddenly aware we could run off the road. ‘Survival Reactions’ kick in. We freeze and run off the road. We grab a big handful of brake and lock the front wheel. We target-fixate on where we’ll crash rather than look to see where the road goes.

Let’s take one final backward step. What triggers SURPRISE? The answer is remarkably straightforward. By definition, it’s when something happened that we didn’t expect. It’s a straightforward anticipation failure.

Now, I can already hear people saying “but if you’d observed, ANTICIPATED and concentrated…”

But when was the last time you crashed on a corner? As I mentioned earlier, crashes are remarkably rare events.

As I mentioned, a lack of experience and a lack of skill means we’re at higher risk of a crash, but the longer we ride without a crash, the simple truth is it becomes more difficult for us to mentally view a bend as a high risk area. It would be a mistake to call this complacency – it’s a function of the way our brains see the world outside. We’re biased towards looking on the bright side – for more on this, have a read of a book called ‘The Optimism Bias’ by neuroscientist Tali Sharot. The more we do something, and EVEN THOUGH THE RISKS ARE UNCHANGED, the less aware of the risks we become. Ask any builder who’s fallen off a ladder.

If there IS a risk of complacency, paradoxically it’s likely to come after more training. Think about it. The language of riding, driving and road safety generally is about “getting better” and the better we get (in this case, the fewer scares we have mid-corner), the more likely we are to assume everything will go right. The combination of training (which tells us that skilled riders have fewer crashes) AND a crash-free history leads us to believe it’s our training keeping us safe, rather than the laws of chance. Just like tossing dice, each bend comes with a level of risk, and we just haven’t met that unique set of circumstances that could trip us up…

…yet.

Don’t believe me? Roadcraft talks about being prepared for what we can “reasonably expect to happen”. If we don’t get caught out in a corner, that becomes the ‘reasonable’ option. We may not realise it but that’s what our repeated experience is teaching us. But what it doesn’t take away is the risk that the very next corner could be the one that’s laid a trap just for us.

Once we understand this, ‘inexplicable’ crashes start to explain themselves.

Hopefully, now we are aware of how repeated experience and optimism can warp our assessment of risk, we’ll see how to defeat SURPRISE! Instead of planning for “what we can reasonably expect to happen” and thinking that “I’ve done everything I can to ensure the corner goes right”, we MUST reverse our thinking 180 degrees and prepare for UNREASONABLE events. We need to plan for the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ to see a bend might go wrong, rather than planning the ‘right way’ to ride around it. As I explain on my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses, predicting the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ isn’t difficult, but really is a very different mindset to the standard ‘right way’ approach to riding.

Achieving this pragmatic “I’ve taken all the precautions I can but anything could still go wrong ” mindset is known as developing ‘insight’ and has been used successfully in risk management training in other fields. What’s very interesting is that the latest research is suggesting that with just a modest level of machine control ability, developing the insight that engages a “what could go wrong” mindset has significant benefits. I suggest this is because if we’re expecting something to go wrong, when the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ turns up mid-corner, we’re far less likely to suffer SURPRISE! for the simple reason we had predicted it. That would seem to be the way to defeat Code’s inappropriate ‘Survival Reactions’.

So how can we plan for what might go wrong? It’s simple enough – we just need to look at where other riders got it wrong! That’s where we are most likely to caught out ourselves. The three ‘standard’ crashes are at junctions, on corners and during overtakes and they happen to novice and expert riders alike. Once we realise that, it’s easier to be on red alert.

There’s one final step. Even if we correctly anticipate an emergency and avoid freezing, over-reacting or target-fixating, we really need a pre-planned response to beat SURPRISE! If we have to figure out a solution on the fly is about as likely as pulling a rabbit out of our crash hat. We need to know whether we’re going to need to change speed, change position, sound the horn, swerve or hit the anchors BEFORE the emergency starts to develop, or those ‘Survival Reactions’ will still kick in. That’s why even highly trained and highly experienced riders still fall victim to age-old crashes.

So yes, by all means observe, anticipate and concentrate. But learn about crashing, understand ‘Survival Reactions’ and then use that knowledge to anticipate where things will go wrong, rather than how they might go right. That’s the best way to deal with SURPRISE!

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65. Seven reasons SMIDSYs happen

This is another early article which seeks to understand the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision between a motorcycle and a car, and to go beyond the simplistic “the driver didn’t look / didn’t look properly” ‘explanation’ relied on by road safety. SMIDSYs remain the leading cause of motorcycle crashes at junctions. The focus on human perception limits, positioning, and proactive riding is fully consistent with modern collision research and advanced rider training. A few years back I gave it a mild re-write to make it a little clearer, fixed some typos and added some extra comments based on my more recent investigations on motion camouflage, peripheral blindness, saccadic masking, size-arrival effect, and workload. The analysis remains accurate and supported by contemporary cognitive science and traffic psychology. As I explained in the earlier article, it’s important for us motorcyclists to realise that the SMIDSY is a ‘Two to Tangle’ collision. That is, if the driver SETS UP the conditions in which a crash CAN happen, the motorcyclist still has to RIDE INTO IT to complete it. That means most junction collisions are avoidable.

Seven reasons SMIDSYs happen

Another day, another ‘biker down’ forum thread. What happened? The rider is minding his own business on a main road, a car pulls out from left, the rider doesn’t manage to take evasive action and takes a trip to hospital in the back of an ambulance. It’s so common, it’s something that virtually all riders are aware of.

Unfortunately, along with the ‘get well soon’ messages, it also generated the usual non-thinking “drivers kill bikers” responses. So, let’s drag ourselves out of the blame culture the entire country seems to be slipping into, and see if we can work out why the “Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You” SMIDSY crash is still happening, one hundred years after the first intrepid riders powered off on two wheels.

One of the common factors revealed by accident analyses by expert collision investigators is that many of these crashes COULD be avoided IF the rider:

  • saw it coming

  • responded in time

But looking at crash stats we’re no better at avoiding them than motorcyclists back in the 1950s. Collisions at junctions remain the most common collision between a car and a bike. So here are SEVEN REASONS SMIDSYs HAPPEN.

There are some pretty well-documented problems.

1 – the ‘See and Be Seen’ issue – we have to be where the driver can physically see us for him to have a chance.

This is still one of the toughest concepts for riders to get their heads round, not least because so many safety campaigns are aimed at drivers and telling them to ‘look twice’ or ‘look harder’ for bikes. But it’s no good the driver looking harder if we’re in the wrong place. If the driver’s to have a chance of making the right decision, we have to open up a line of sight to the driver’s eyes. Before anything else, we need to do is to LOOK for places where vehicles pull out. If we do that, then we can work out what the driver can and can’t see, and POSITION our bikes where the driver has a chance of seeing it. It’s no good knowing the junction is there if we’re in the wrong place; unless Superman is driving we’re invisible.

[Recent stats suggest that around 1 in 5 junction collisions happen when the rider isn’t where the driver could see the bike. It’s not just roadside furniture but also the internal structures of the car too. We NEED that line of sight to the driver.]

2 – the ‘camouflage’ effects of lights and multi-coloured bike/clothing – riding lights, hi-vis and bright clothing don’t necessarily help you be seen.

Ever since the 1970s, it’s been assumed that if bikes are hard to see, then using day riding lights (DRLs) and hi-vis or light-colour clothing would drivers spot them. Early laboratory research appeared to support that theory. In fact, when we look at accident statistics, there’s little evidence for a significant change – we have just as many ‘looked but failed to see’ collisions at junctions as we ever did.

First of all, hi-vis clothing depends on making a contrast with the background. Ever looked at a yellow hi-vis vest against spring foliage? Almost the same colour. An orange bib will be invisible if you happen to be outlined against autumn leaves or an RAC van. Oddly enough, the colour that probably stands out best is pink – ask yourself how often do you see something pink as you ride? Nothing in nature and few buildings or vehicles!

Meanwhile, Multicolour clothing and paint schemes tend to break up the solid shape that the brain detects as ‘bike and rider’. It’s known as dazzle camouflage and has been used to hide targets by disguising their outline. The visual recognition system in the brain works by recognising shapes the brain has memorised and ‘flagging’ them for more attention (think vintage car owners waving at each other!). Break up the outline and there’s a risk that the a bike doesn’t leap out amongst other traffic and shout “BIKE”, and you can vanish from the driver’s perception. I well remember a tale told by a friend of jumping out of her skin when confronted with two ghosts in the local churchyard, one with no legs, the other headless. It was only when they greeted her that she realized it was two locals from the village. The woman’s shock of grey hair vanished against the grey stonework of the church and the man was wearing dark grey trousers that were invisible against the sloping path behind them. There’s also evidence that lights can actually hide the bike behind them, particularly if you are one of those riders who ride on main beam. The blur of light makes it difficult to pick out size (and thus distance) and speed.

3 – the difficulty of picking up an object headed directly towards us – a motorcycle approaching a driver at a junction isn’t moving across the background because it’s on a near-collision course until the last couple of seconds. ‘Motion camouflage’ – our difficulty in detecting something that is moving straight towards us – and the consequent ‘peripheral blindness’ were known about decades ago in the biological sciences and are behind the hunting patterns of many animals. But only recently has the issue been recognised as applying to humans attempting to detect other vehicles. The suggestion about a positive change of line came originally from an instructor buddy of mine. The eye IS sensitive to lateral movement in peripheral vision, and he develop the idea further into the Z Line, which I talk about in my Science Of Being Seen (SOBS) presentations, and also on the SOBS blog at http://scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com

And that assumes we’re looking in the right place. The eye only has a very narrow cone of clear focus. The rest is blurry peripheral vision. When searching around a scene, we aim this focused vision at specific points which attract attention (see the comment on shapes above). By jumping from point to point, these ‘fixations’ create a picture of what’s around us. But not everything attracts attention. So our bike could be missed as we move our eyes and fall into a ‘saccade’. It’s known as saccadic masking.

4 – experienced drivers fail to scan the whole distance between where they are and the gap they are about to emerge into – it appears they subconsciously assess the kind of road they are emerging onto and look straight into the distance – a bike CLOSER than that gap will be out of the central focus and thus will be invisible until the movement across the background is noticed in peripheral vision which will only happen when the bike is right on top of the viewer (see 3)

This is a learned ‘energy-saving’ phenomenon. The brain consumes huge amounts of the body’s energy supplies so it employs techniques that reduce energy consumption, and one of those techniques is learning short-cuts that have the same effect. We’re taught to look for vehicles when we are waiting to emerge at junctions, but it’s not a very effective strategy on a busy road, because what we need to spot are the gaps! Research initially suggested this was a problem for experienced car drivers who learned by experience, but other studies have suggested ALL road users – motorcyclists included – learn very rapidly indeed that a strategy of ‘looking for other vehicles’ fails at busy junctions, so that we switch to searching for gaps. In nearly every case, it works (if it didn’t, every single junction would be littered with smashed cars) but occasionally it doesn’t. The risk now is that a vehicle close up to us goes missing because we’ve focused behind it on the gap. And we pull out, unaware there is a vehicle between us and the gap. It’s often a motorcycle but whilst some research suggests that whilst drivers make just as many SMIDSY errors in front of other cars (which we might expect), other research indicates that – adjusted for exposure – motorcyclists also pull out in front of other motorcyclists almost as often.

5 – the emerging driver has to look two ways at once… this automatically much more than halves the amount of time he has to see you (think about it – he has to turn his head then refocus in your direction!). Just because you’ve had the driver in clear sight for 10 seconds and thus have had plenty of time YOURSELF to identify and assess the risk, doesn’t mean the driver has had more than a couple of seconds to spot you – and if he looked in the wrong place….

This comment highlights the ‘Two to Tangle’ issue – the rider caught out by the SMIDSY crash can normally see it coming for several seconds before things start to go wrong, but doesn’t use this time effective to prepare. It also hinted at the driver’s problem of ‘saccadic masking’, which is an effect where our vision shuts down when we’re turning our heads quickly – it’s to help preserve balance and prevent the nausea caused by the background rushing past our eyes – think travel sickness. The very latest research – in September 2019 – also suggests that when traffic gets heavy, drivers don’t just lose track of motorcycles, they forgot they saw one. It’s another weakess of the brain – it has a limited ‘buffer’ in which these short-term visial memories can be held ready for processing.

6 – the effect of size – Even when we do spot a motorcycle approaching, it’s difficult to judge speed and distance correctly when it’s heading straightwards us. Viewers overestimate distance and underestimate speed of small objects. Drivers have trouble spotting bikes, and then even more trouble working out where they are and how much time the driver has to make the manoeuvre. Known as the size-arrival effect, which leads to drivers under-estimating speed and over-estimating distance of bikes compared with cars and vans.

7 – the emerging driver has a very complex set of tasks – they have to engage the right gear/slow/stop/steer on the final approach, check both ways, make sense of the information being gathered and plan their own manoeuvre.

By comparison, the approaching rider has a much more simple set of tasks – spot the vehicle at the junction, decide if they can be seen/have good clearance/are on a good bit of surface, decide if they need to slow. This led me to look more indepth at the concept known as ‘workload’, which I’ve talked about in another article. It’s significant – the driver looking to turn out of a junction has a LOT more to monitor than the rider approaching the junction.

FINALLY…

Whatever the reason for a SMIDSY, it makes sense to be proactive – to make preparations for things going wrong – check behind, cover the brakes (possibly even set them up by applying them lightly) and prepare to brake or swerve. Then we’re much less likely to be taken by SURPRISE! and require our own ambulance trip to hospital.

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58. Euphoria – when our riding is just too good to be true

Looking back, I think a good subtitle might have been — “when we are having too much fun!” It conveys the psychological angle to the reader and hints at the subtle danger: it’s not anger, panic, or incompetence, but a state of overconfidence. It signals that the article is about a mental state as much as a riding technique and touches on a psychological state that is increasingly recognised in traffic psychology: a subtle form of overconfidence or “flow-induced risk” rather than outright anger or recklessness. Skill and routine mask the creeping erosion of safety margins — a state that can be more dangerous than obvious adrenaline-fuelled risk-taking because the rider believes everything is under control. The danger is that we don’t notice the shrinking safety margin until something jolts us out of the flow. Awareness of this state, deliberate self-checks, and the willingness to slow down or take a break remain crucial safeguards — even for the most experienced riders.

Euphoria – when our riding is just too good to be true

I got thinking after I got an email from one of my regular correspondents:

“Riding home after work, I felt in the mood for ‘pushing on’ a bit. I was congratulating myself on the swift progress I was making through the traffic, some drivers seemed a bit more aggressive than usual, but, what the hell, that was all part of the fun. The prat who pushed in too close to me and got a stare in return was just that, a prat. The close-ish encounters with traffic islands were just good timing, as was the manoeuvre to avoid the cyclist I spotted a bit late as I filtered rather wide and swiftly along the road.

“However, when I went through the red light I realised maybe I wasn’t riding quite as well as I thought. Didn’t realise, in fact, that the light was against me until half way across the junction. Luckily it was clear, because if it hadn’t been I’m not at all sure I’d have realised.”

He went on to say that perhaps after a stressful day at work he was a bit wound up.

Anyone recognise the symptoms? I have to admit to having days like that when I was a courier, and occasionally on other rides too.

It used to hit me towards the end of a long day. Partly tiredness, partly boredom with doing what became as routine as any other job. I’d get into a groove. In town I’d find myself slicing through rush hour traffic, filtering at high speed, overtaking through small gaps, running amber lights. Out of town I’d be zooming through bends, using big lean angles and engaging in heavy braking. It wasn’t as if I was in a rush to get somewhere either, in fact I’d feel more relaxed than normal. As the risky manoeuvre came off, I’d try them again for fun. It felt all so easy.

All TOO easy.

This state of euphoria is a close cousin to, but not the same as, red mist. The problem is that what’s happening to us usually only becomes evident after something scary or an obvious mistake snaps us out of it. Whilst red mist is characterised by obviously irrational behaviour – usually massive risk taking – in this euphoric state, we really believe we’re doing our normal thing, but in reality we are eating much deeper into our safety margin – maybe even exceeding it.

The bad news is that it’s almost addictive. And there’s a massive temptation to push towards the limits and enjoy the buzz as nothing seems to go wrong whilst we ride quicker and quicker, closer and closer to the edge. But sooner or later we WILL push too hard and cross the line. So riding in this way and waiting for the big mistake to tell us that we were actually in over our heads isn’t such a great idea.

Personally, I got to recognise the symptoms on those despatch jobs, and have been able to rein myself in before things get too out of control. I’d make a conscious decision to slow down, take a break or even turn off the radio and go home early!

One of the questions I ask myself as I ride is: “did that look dangerous to other road users?” If I have to say to myself: “yes, it probably did” then it’s time to dial down the fun and head, rather more slowly, for home.