Tag: psychology

Posted on

55. Workload – the reason to Keep it Simple, Stupid

When this article was first written, the idea that rider and driver errors were often the result of cognitive overload rather than poor attitude or insufficient commitment was not widely accepted in motorcycling. Even now, there is still pushback in certain sectors framing errors as a simple deficiency in attitude or technique.

Since then, the same conclusions this article draws have been repeatedly confirmed in aviation, medicine and other safety-critical industries: human attention is finite, workload is cumulative, and once capacity is exceeded, performance degrades in predictable ways. This article reads, in hindsight, like a bridge between disciplines — translating human factors research into rider language well before that became fashionable. I could legitimately position it as an early application of systems safety thinking to motorcycling rather than simply an “advanced riding” piece.

Is it still relevant? Absolutely. Modern motorcycles may be more capable and modern riders more skilled, but the human brain — whether that’s the rider’s or the driver’s — has not changed. If anything, increased traffic density, in-helmet communications, information-rich dash panels and navigation systems, and ever-more complex riding environments make workload management more important than ever. The principles that follow were not speculative then — and they are even more relevant now.

Workload – the reason to Keep it Simple, Stupid

Over the years, one of my areas of fascination in researching the background for my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses has been the human brain and how it copes with riding. Our brains reached their current form with the appearance of Homo Sapiens around 200,000 years ago. But many components that make up our modern brain have their origins in the lower branches of the evolutionary tree. It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me how something that evolved when man had a top speed of something over 20 mph should be able to function rapidly enough to deal with riding at speeds well above that. I initially wrote this article with half an eye on the claims that using a hands-free mobile phone was safer than using a hand-held device, and with the other half on claims that skilled riders can safely use more complicated skills and techniques. It’s been rewritten somewhat, but the essential thinking about our ability to process limited amounts of information remains unchanged, as is the conclusion that we should use the simplest technique that is effective. Eventually, all this reading around the topic produced my book ‘MIND over MOTORCYCLE’ which you can find on my publisher page at http://lulu.com/spotlight/SurvivalSkills. The book covers all this and more.

In the mid-80s a series of studies were carried out to evaluate a proposed one-man attack helicopter. The cockpit systems used a significant amount of automation. Neverthelss, it was determined that a single crew member could not adequately perform all the required tasks. As a result, the Comanche helicopter uses a two-person crew.

The term workload refers to the total demand placed on an individual as a task is performed. And even experienced and expert riders have a finite limit to the mental workload they can handle.

Now, if you want to, you can skip forward to how we cope on the road, but if you want more detail about the demands workload places on the brain, carry on reading.

The theory of competing resource channels

One explanation is that workload does not make demands on a single ‘central’ processing resource but instead uses several channels which compete for processing resources.

This theory was propopsed because we can easily walk and chew gum at the same time, but we cannot talk and listen at the same time – one explanation is that there must be multiple resources for information processing. These processing resources are usually described by four components; visual, auditory, cognitive and psychomotor, and any task can be broken down into the demands it places on each resource channel. The visual and auditory components refer to the external stimuli that are attended to, the cognitive component refers to the level of information processing required and the psychomotor component refers to the physical actions.

Rating scales have been developed for each component. The scales provide a relative rating of the degree to which each resource component is used. They were developed by providing surveys containing matched pairs of task descriptions to a range of human factors experts who were asked to indicate, for each pairing, which one required a higher level of effort. The higher the scale value the greater the degree of use of the resource component.

Scale – Value Description of Activity

  • Visual

0.0 – No Visual Activity

1.0 – Visually Register/Detect (detect occurrence of image)

3.7 – Visually Discriminate (detect visual differences)

4.0 – Visually Inspect/Check (discrete inspection/static condition)

5.0 – Visually Locate/Align (selective orientation)

5.4 – Visually Track/Follow (maintain orientation)

5.9 – Visually Read (symbol)

7.0 – Visually Scan/Search/Monitor (continuous/serial inspection, multiple conditions)

  • Auditory

0.0 – No Auditory Activity

1.0 – Detect/Register Sound (detect occurrence of sound)

2.0 – Orient to Sound (general orientation/attention)

4.2 – Orient to Sound (selective orientation/attention)

4.3 – Verify Auditory Feedback (detect occurrence of anticipated sound)

4.9 – Interpret Semantic Content (speech)

6.6 – Discriminate Sound Characteristics (detect auditory differences)

7.0 – Interpret Sound Patterns (pulse rates, etc.)

  • Cognitive

0.0 – No Cognitive Activity

1.0 – Automatic (simple association)

1.2 – Alternative Selection

3.7 – Sign/Signal Recognition

4.6 – Evaluation/Judgment (consider single aspect)

5.3 – Encoding/Decoding, Recall

6.8 – Evaluation/Judgment (consider several aspects)

7.0 – Estimation, Calculation, Conversion

  • Psychomotor

0.0 – No Psychomotor Activity

1.0 – Speech

2.2 – Discrete Actuation (button, toggle, trigger)

2.6 – Continuous Adjustive (flight control, sensor control)

4.6 – Manipulative

5.8 – Discrete Adjustive (rotary, vertical thumbwheel, lever position)

6.5 – Symbolic Production (writing)

7.0 – Serial Discrete Manipulation (keyboard entries)

Generally speaking, we have enough mental resources to carry out the most demanding tasks in any one of these categories or to carry out multiple but undemanding tasks that engage different channels.

But…

if we’re performing more than one task at the same time and those tasks make demands on similar components, the result is likely to be excess workload – we simply run out of brainpower to perform both tasks effectively. Any cumulative workload value of 8 or more was defined as an unacceptable workload level. Once we exceed the acceptable workload, the result is likely to be errors in our performance of those tasks. This includes a general slowing-down of the performance (it takes longer to process data and respond), task shedding (where we forget to do something completely), or rapid task switching (we hop back and forth ineffectually from one task to the other).

The component scale has been applied to model the tasks of driving whilst making a call on a mobile phone.

Task: Vis. Aud. Cog. Psy-M.

Driving: 6 1 3.7 2.6

Stopped at Light: 3 1 3.7 0

Start after stop: 6 1 4.6 2.6

Dial and Press Send: 5 4.3 5.3 7

Wait to connect: 0 4.3 3.7 2.6

Talk: 0 6 6.8 2.6

The model can therefore predict the individual component and total workload of the combined driving and cell phone tasks at any point during the execution of the combined tasks.

Workload Maximum Mean

Visual 11.00 6.26

Auditory 7.00 6.62

Cognitive 10.50 10.02

Psychomotor 9.60 5.43

From these figures it’s clear that the combined Cognitive tasks of driving whilst talking on the phone exceed the acceptable workload figures at all times. It’s not just when dialling to make a call when the task also makes demands of our visual and psychomotor resources which exceed the acceptable workload. And so drivers attempting to hold a conversation on a hands-free phone whilst behind the wheel are prone to make mistakes that a driver focused solely on driving would be highly unlikely to make.

What about on two wheels? The resources required to ride the bike would include all four components; the visual resource of looking at the road ahead, the cognitive resource as we interprete the visual data, the psychomotor resource which refers to the movement of arms, hands and feet to control the machine and even the auditory resource which would monitor from the sound of the engine.

So, how does this impact on real riding?

There is a limit to the amount of ‘mental processing power’ we have to ride a motorcycle. It would sound like riding would be difficult, if not impossible, in complex riding situations because we would exceed the workload limit. So we’d expect to see errors in performance of various tasks, a slowing-down of the performance of those tasks, task-shedding where we lose track of one part of the overall task, or rapid task switching where we ineffectually hop back and forth from one part of task to the another.

And in fact, that’s exactly what an instructor will see with a novice rider. A complex task such as a right turn (which involves making visual checks, a change of gear and the movement of the indicator switch, the cognitive element of judging speed and distance of the machine and other vehicles, plus the steering of the machine itself) might be performed perfectly off-road. But as soon as the novice rider attempts the same task on-road, it’s often poorly performed; visual checks go missing, the bike ends up in the wrong gear or the clutch control goes out the window, and indicators get forgotten.

So how do we ever overcome the problem?

The answer is that we ‘automate’ routine tasks – for example, the clutch / gear / throttle manipulation soon becomes so deeply embedded we no longer think about it, it just ‘happens’. And we can also learn to have a pre-planned response to specific ‘cue’ which also occurs below the level of consciousness. People have trouble believing this but our response to a red traffic light is a good example. Once out of the novice stage where we’re still actively scanning around for traffic signals, we don’t really ‘see’ the red light, we just drop into the routine of judging speed and distance, and slowing down effectively.

So, with experience, we become able to handle many straightforward tasks without having to process the incoming data in the real-time conscious ‘thinking’ brain. And that frees up attention for effective mirror checks, checking the surface ahead of us where we’re going to brake, and wondering whether the light might change back to green before we have to stop.

But the more complicated the task, the less attention we have to spare. Maybe we’re attempting to negotiate not just a single set of lights, but a complex road layout with multiple lanes in busy traffic, whilst trying to read road signs. Now, there’s a good chance we start to task-shed and skip steps – because our eyes are scanning the scene ahead, mirror checks often go missing.

And this brings me back to the helicopter. We don’t have the luxury of a second crew member. We have to get everything right alone, and that means the simpler we make riding, the less likely we are to hit the workload limit, and where something has to give.

I’ve written about overtaking, and gone through all the many points at which an overtake can go wrong – this article should give you a better idea why. The workload processing required to decide whether an overtake is ‘on’ or not takes even highly-experienced riders to the limit or even beyond their ability to mentally process all the data. So it’s incredibly easy to miss something, and it’s usually something obvious when we look at what went wrong retrospectively. Something as simple as the vehicle being overtaken indicating to turn right. Because of the demands on our processing resources, the flashing indicator never made it into the rider’s conscious awareness. And that’s why I suggest that we always keep things as simple as possible. If there are two ways to perform a task, the simplest method is nearly always the most reliable way.

And don’t forget the problem of talking on a mobile phone. But what do some instructors ask trainees to do – talk into a radio whilst riding in the form of a verbal commentary. Asking even an experienced rider to make a verbal commentary on a ride isn’t a good idea because it pushes the rider into ‘workload overload’ condition – check out the values from the first table:

Searching the road ahead: 7.0 – (Visually Scan/Search/Monitor (continuous/serial inspection, multiple conditions) )

Think what to say: 6.8 – (Evaluation/Judgment (consider several aspects) )

Say it: 1.0 – (Speech)

TOTAL WORKLOAD: 14:8

That’s way over our workload limit and we’ve not even talked about riding the bike! So that is why I don’t ask riders to perform a commentary ride.

“But the police do it all the time” I hear you say.

Indeed. Now, listen to HOW they talk. They have learned a very stilted, formalised language. They’ve essentially removed the need to THINK how to express what they see. And this brings workload down significantly. They also learn commentary riding and driving as part of a much longer course than a civvie rider will ever experience.

So this is why I do NOT require anyone to perform a commentary AS they ride. What I do is find places to stop, and let them perform their commentary at the side of the road. We’ve removed the workload connected with riding the machine and they can turn all their faculties towards identifying hazards. Even when I perform a commentary ride for the trainee, I’m aware that they have to listen, consider what I’ve just said, and visually search the scene to see what I’m talking about. So I only ever perform a commentary ride at a nice gentle pace that minimises the other workload demands on my trainee.

And finally, the workload overload issue is one of the reasons I use a building block approach to training, and why speeds are kept low when applying those new techniques. Covering new techniques one at a time is less-demanding and keeping speed down allows for correction when (not if!) mistakes are made.

Posted on

51. Target Fixation – Question and Answer

Although this article was first written back in the early 2000s, the underlying problem it describes has not gone away. Modern explanations would frame this as stress physiology rather than evolutionary mismatch. Target fixation is now better understood as a stress-driven narrowing of attention that degrades both decision-making and fine motor control, rather than a simple bad habit. Modern bikes with ABS and traction control reduce the consequences of panic inputs, but they do not prevent the psychological trigger that causes riders to freeze, stare, and steer poorly. The solutions remain fundamentally the same: earlier anticipation to avoid surprise, deliberate visual strategies to direct the bike where you want it to go, and sufficient confidence in braking and steering to prevent fear from taking over. Modern coaching combines teaching riders to notice physiological cues (holding breath, locked arms, fixed gaze) with a more deliberate visual drill that replaces simply “looking away” with a more proactive visual targeting to focus on the exit.

Target Fixation – Question and Answer

If you’ve read Keith Code’s ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books, you may recall he talked about ‘Survival Reactions’. He described these as the unwanted but instinctive attempts to preserve us from harm, that work against our learned responses. For example, we may have spent hours working on a nice progressive squeeze when practicing emergency stops, but in a real-life crisis, it’s hard not to revert to a sudden grab and stamp on the brakes. I crashed precisely this way several times till I got the hang of it. It’s not an accident modern machines are fitted with ABS. Panic grabs can be worked on, but rather more subtle is another of Code’s Survival Reactions. It’s called ‘target fixation’. If you want to know more, read on.

Q I’ve heard quite a lot about something called target fixation, but I don’t know what it is?

A Target fixation is the state we find ourselves in when we can’t drag our attention away from a hazard on the road. It nearly always occurs when the there’s a threat of personal harm, maybe from hitting something hard like a car, from running out of road in a corner or because we’ve just spotted a patch of diesel – because it’s a threat, we look at it.

Q But it seems obvious to me that if there is something dangerous in front of you, you ought to look at it?

A Obvious – but wrong! Right from basic training we tell trainees “you go where you look” because that’s how we get there. It works… except in an emergency.

Q Alright, so the basic theory is to look where you want to go, but why does this work? We can’t steer the bike with our eyes so what do you mean?

A Given half a chance, any hazard will grab the whole of our attention, and instead of finding a way out of trouble we freeze and go deeper into it. Essentially this is a passive reaction to a hazard. We need to find a safe route past the threat so instead of having our attention drawn towards what we don’t want to do (hitting the car, running out of road mid-corner or losing control on the diesel) we need to snap our focus to the way OUT of trouble instead. Is there a route past the car? Can we look around the bend and lean over more to get there? Is there clear tarmac past the diesel? We need to recognise the threat of target fixation if we to find a way out of trouble.

Q I still don’t get this. Surely it’s easy to avoid a hazard?

A That’s the theory in a lot of road safety literature. In practice it ignores the way the brain works under stress. As I mentioned, Code identified target fixation as an instinctive reaction to danger which overwhelms rational decision-making. After the event – usually when we’ve got over the adrenalin of the scare – it’s blindingly obvious we were target-fixated, but mid-emergency it’s incredibly difficult to overcome because the brain is hardwired to avoid danger. Unfortunately, these reactions evolved several million years before anyone invented a motorcycle. That’s why they are completely inappropriate.

Q OK, so I know I shouldn’t, but I still can’t seem to do anything else but look at what I’m going to hit?

A Whilst advice to look away from the hazard is valid, we actually need to prevent the instinctive target fixation in the first place. And to do that we need to understand something about the trigger – ie. what state of mind sets off the survival reaction in the first place. At the most basic level it’s fear of being hurt. So the moment we start to think that our space is being squeezed by other road users, that we’re running out of room in the corner, or that we can’t avoid the slippery surface, we’re setting up the conditions in which survival reactions and target fixation will kick in.

Q So I need to improve my observation?

A Sort of… because the earlier we see a hazards, the less that can take us by SURPRISE! And it turns out that it’s SURPRISE! that’s the trigger for these survival reactions. As soon as the situation ahead develops in a way that we weren’t expecting, SURPRISE! kicks in, and then we’re at risk of triggering the survival reactions.

So observation is part of it – we need to be aware of what’s around us – road layout, road surface, other vehicles and so on – but we also need to know what we CAN’T SEE. And then we need to ask the “What if…?” question to anticipate what might happen next. Motorcycle Roadcraft says we need to consider “what we can reasonably expect to happen”. In fact this isn’t enough. We need to expect the UNREASONABLE. If we only ever expect what usually happens, we’ll be caught out by what doesn’t normally happen. It’s too late to think when the car pulls out, because we will trip those survival reactions. We have to be holding in our heads a plan to deal with that car long before it starts to move. Similarly, we need to anticipate that the easy-looking corner ahead will tighten up or that the far side of the roundabout has a diesel slick over it. It’s running through “What if…?” scenarios before they become real that prevents SURPRISE!

Q So I’m scanning and planning. But running into corners I still freeze on occasion. What else can help?

A A bit of lateral thinking. You wouldn’t be freezing if you were confident in your abilities to get out of trouble. So going back to basics, everything we do on a bike involves either a change of speed or a change of direction. If we aren’t confident with steering, braking and to a lesser extent accelerating, any threatening situation that relies on these skills to get out of trouble is going to scare us. For example, on my Survival Skills Performance courses I am regularly helping riders who find themselves struggling with cornering. What I usually find is either a lack of confidence with the steering or a lack of confidence with the brakes. Sometimes both.

Q So how does that cause me to freeze?

A Simple. On the courses I run, it turns out that the rider isn’t really going too fast, but just thinks he/she is! And because the rider thinks “I’m going too fast” it kicks off the target fixation and frozen steering which is another survival reaction. So having scared themselves, on the next bend not only are they very slow, but they turn into the corner far too early, which leads them to run wide on the exit to the bend, setting off target fixation. So it all becomes a bit of a vicious circle. It goes wrong because you expect it to go wrong.

Q OK, I believe you. So what can I do to improve my cornering now?

A Not surprisingly my first suggestion would be get some training. On my cornering courses, as soon as we work on more positive use of the brakes and steering to get the speed off quickly and to change direction rapidly, the problem usually vanishes. Knowing that the bike can be slowed and steered around the bend removes the trigger for the target fixation.

If you can’t get yourself onto a Survival Skills training course, then my advice would be to work on braking. You should know how to do a decent emergency stop. Practice that skills off-road till you can do really good ones, and then just apply the same basic approach (without pulling up quite so hard) on the road. Learning to sort your approach speed on corners is the only way you’ll learn how to judge your braking. You don’t have to brake harshly, just avoid rolling off and coasting into the bend. Get moderately competent at that and itt’ll take away the fear of running in too fast. Next learn all about counter-steering, then go and practice quick steering exercises. Start off-road with some swerves, then take what you’ve learned out on the road and get confident at making rapid changes of direction in bends. In both cases, start slow and cautiously, then build up the speed as your control gets better. But if you really don’t know how to do a safe emergency stop, get some professional help!

And if you really want to fix cornering, find out about the Survival Skills ‘Point and Squirt’ approach to cornering, which is all about going in deep, and making a slower but more rapid change of direction when we can see where the road goes next, before accelerating upright out of the corner. Having the reference points that I teach – ‘landmarks’ if you like – means you always know exactly what you’ve going to be doing and where you’ve going to do it. So it’s a positive approach, where we ‘seize the corner by the scruff of the neck and shake it out the way we want to to go’ approach, rather than a passive, “where is the corner taking me?” response.

Q How do I know I’m getting it right?

A Simple – apart from not scaring yourself so often, you’ll find you’re more relaxed on the bike.

Posted on

50. A time to live…

Not long ago, I heard a rider raving about his new bike. His LED lights enabled him to ride faster at night, his high-tech semi-active suspension allowed him to corner faster, and his cornering ABS would sort out the problems… at least, that’s what he believed. The problem he hadn’t spotted is that no-one had upgraded the ‘wetware’ behind the bars. Despite these undoubted advances, a major cause of serious motorcycle crashes remains late perception — by the rider, by other road users, or both. This article’s central thesis is that time is a fundamental survival currency, and the more of it we have, the better-off we are. It’s just is as valid today as it ever was. Nothing here has yet been invalidated by technology.

A time to live…

Have you ever been floored by an unexpected question? I have. I’m not a quick thinker on my feet. It’s why I’m not great at interviews – I like to have someone give me a question and then have time to think about the answer. The same applies out on the road. Putting ourselves in a position where we need to come up with a quick response to an unexpected question, a riding problem that requires a rapid solution causes many of us difficulties. Not surprisingly, what happens unexpectedly is a prime cause of crashes.

So let’s take some time to think about a question for you. What do:

  1. “See and be seen”

  2. “Only a fool breaks the two second rule”

  3. “Position wide for view in a bend”

…all have in common?

The first is straight from basic training, the second is from a road safety campaign, and the third is a general axiom any advanced rider will recognise.

Answer – they all give us time on the road.

What is so important about time? It’s a window of opportunity to see potential danger, and offers time to think what to do. The earlier we spot danger and the more time we have, the more likely we are to make the right decision.

Given enough time, we’d never over-cook it in bends, never be surprised when someone pulls out in front of us, never be caught out by a poor surface.

So gaining space and time is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

But it doesn’t just work for the rider. We have to be in the right place to seen by other road users so that they too have time to understand what they are seeing, and how they can respond to our presence.

And that’s where ‘See and Be Seen’ must be applied. It’s something we try to hammer into new riders on basic training courses, but so often experienced riders – even those with post-test credentials – seem to have forgotten the basic lessons, and ride as if they are unaware of the risks posed by blind areas and ‘Surprise Horizons’ which may conceal a vehicle. Unless we put ourselves in a place where we CAN be seen, then there’s little chance that driver will consider the possibility that there might be a motorcycle approaching. And when we appear and SURPRISE! other drivers and they are unlikely to react predictably!

An awful lot of “Sorry Mate, I didn’t see you” SMIDSY collisions happen when the biker is hidden in traffic or behind road furniture, or behind the car’s own bodywork. Some studies have estimated it’s around one in five of all ‘Looked But Failed To See’ collisions.

Our lack of width on two wheel is both a disadvantage (it makes us harder to spot) and an advantage (it allows us to change position).

Use the one to compensate for the other. See and be seen. Find some time and use it to live.

Posted on

47. Sorry Mate, I didn’t see you – an analysis of SMIDSY accidents

The first version of this article was written over two decades ago, but has its roots back in the mid-90s when I first got online, and discovered that the SMIDSY was far from unique to the UK. That was very relevant when, in 1995, I first got involved in rider training back in 1995 and discovered the sum of advice to new riders was to wear hi-vis and ride with their lights on “so drivers would see them”. What my research showed was that SMIDSY collisions are primarily not a driver ‘failure to look’, and much more of a human visual-perception problem. Whilst I found that research into these collisions had been going on since the 1960s and really took off in the 70s, not much of the science had made its way into road safety or motorcycle safety. When I first delivered the ‘Science Of Being Seen’ presentation in 2012, it was met with a lot of scepticism. But since then, much of what I describe here has since been validated time and again by academics and by independent commentators including FortNine.

The conceptual framework — looked but could not see, looked but failed to see, and looked, saw and misjudged — remains one of the clearest and most practically useful ways of understanding junction collisions. The explanations of motion camouflage, contrast issues, saccadic masking, workload, and size-arrival effect are all still scientifically sound and are now increasingly accepted within professional driver and rider training, and these terms are now being referred to by ordinary riders on a regular basis. The article has not been undermined by time; rather, the rest of the motorcycling world has been slowly catching up with it.

Sorry Mate, I didn’t see you – an analysis of SMIDSY accidents

When I updated these articles in the summer and autumn of 2019, I realised that in some ways, this article is probably the most important I’ve ever written. It was written in response to the frequent and strident claims that ‘drivers don’t look properly for bikes’. And it was in this very article – written in the early 2000s – that for the first time I put down in reasonably clear terms an explanation of the need for riders to understand the visual perception issues behind the ‘Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You’ collision. Historically, the rider has always blamed the driver for not looking properly, but my background of SMIDSY-dodging as a London-based courier plus my increasing experience as an instructor made me wonder why the advice to drivers to “look harder for bikes” and the advice to bikers to “make yourself more conspicuous” wasn’t working. The failure of the ‘Think Bike’ and ‘Ride Bright’ advice – which dates back to the mid-1970s – became very evident when I began to investigate collision statistics – the proportion of junction collisions had remained unchanged from the early 70s (when no-one used day riding lights or hi-vis clothing) to the time when I wrote the article in 2003.

I’d already read a lot of research papers as a way of developing my training courses and had discovered quite a lot about motorcycle conspicuity and the reasons for car / bike collisions when I was invited to work with Kent Fire and Rescue Service on the ‘Biker Down’ course.

So when, in 2011-12, I created the ‘Science Of Being Seen’ presentation (or SOBS for short) it was this research which formed the basis of the presentation. Perhaps not surprisingly given that motorcyclists have seen a stream of road safety campaigns all aimed at drivers telling them to ‘look harder’ or ‘look twice’ for bikes, we have tended to believe that the reason for the SMIDSY collision is because “drivers don’t look properly”. SOBS shows that’s not true, and explains the real issues facing the driver – ‘looked but COULD NOT see’, ‘looked but FAILED to see’ and looked, saw and MISJUDGED’ errors – why the conspicuity strategies we motorcyclists have employed – hi-vis clothing and day-riding lights (DRLs) have failed to have any meaningful impact on collision statistics. It’s why I suggest that it’s down to us riders to take responsibility for evading the driver’s error when it happens.

Since then, I’ve continued to investigate the problem of motorcycle perception and visual perception, and the presentation which I continue to deliver at nearly every Biker Down in Kent, has been continually updated with the very latest research. And in terms of collisions, nothing much has changed since, as it happens.

But this article is where it all started, getting on for two decades ago. So although I’ve annotated the article in places, the basic text is left unchanged apart from a couple of minor typos I’ve corrected. And if you want to read the very latest thinking, then head for the SOBS website at www.scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com.

Most bike riders these days also have a car licence and drive a car, usually as their main means of transport, using the bike for fun or sometimes commuting. Yet to listen to a lot of the discussion that goes on about “witless cagers” you’d be hard-pressed to realise that.

But given that we nearly all drive cars, and our old friend the SMIDSY accident still accounts for the majority of car/bike accidents aren’t we likely at some time or another to have made exactly the mistake that we pillory drivers for? How many of us when on four wheels have done the unthinkable and pulled out on a bike?

As one honest motorcycle forum contributor admitted [after a near-miss in his car]: “Now if I can do this, what chance for the poor booger in his Mondeo who has got no idea of what we are about… what still bugs me is that, if they’d run into me, I’d have heard myself saying, in total honesty, as I helped sweep them to the side of the road: ‘Sorry mate, I didn’t see you'”.

I’ve mentioned before that I nearly took out an R1 when they first came out… poor gloomy light, twin headlights apparently a long way off against a background of trees, me wanting to pull across the path of the oncoming vehicle and turn right, so all I needed was a gap sufficient to make it to the other lane.

Seemed safe enough so I started to go…

…but something wasn’t quite right about the movement of the lights across the dark background and I hit the brakes again, stopping about halfway across the line.

Just as well I did! By the time I’d refocused on the oncoming vehicle, it was obviously a bike, moving at a fair lick, and MUCH, much closer than I had realised.

Two thoughts struck me at the time. The first was that the widely spaced lights on an R1 DO look like a car further off – I went home and even on the GSX-R where they are much closer together, immediately put a different coloured bulb in one headlight – technically illegal but it’s my safety I’m worried about here.

The second was that the rider hadn’t apparently reacted to me at all. He was just going to sail completely oblivious into the accident I was about to cause. Yes, technically my fault, but did he have to have it with me? Could he not have done something positive himself? There was no blast of high beam and/or horn, no anchoring up, no swerve to the other side of the road (it was clear, remember or I wouldn’t have been about to pull out).

[NOTE – “technically my fault, but did he have to have it with me?”… echoes of my very first article for the Motorcycle Action Group newspaper in 2002 – “it takes two to tangle” – the driver may be the one setting up the crash, but the rider still has to ride into it to complete the collision. And, as in the near-miss I had with the R1 rider, the rider can nearly always see it coming.]

OK, so let’s take a reality check.

Cars do pull out on bikes. Fact.

In around 90% of them, the bike is on the priority road, so technically it’s the car driver’s mistake. Fact.

But if we, as bikers, can STILL make that mistake when on four wheels, knowing all we know about car drivers doing it to us when we’re on two, it’s worth looking at in more depth.

I’ve previously suggested proactive strategies for dealing with SMIDSY incidents, but let’s ask some questions about why drivers don’t see bikes. If we can understand why things go wrong, it may make more sense as to why it’s US as riders that have to deal with the situation, rather than use the “it was the other guy’s fault, I had right of way, he should have seen me” excuse.

There are a whole bunch of reasons to worry when you approach a junction:

There is the driver with simple defective eyesight – plenty of them around…

There is the driver who doesn’t look properly – too many in-car distractions, be it children running amok, the mobile phone demanding immediate attention or just singing along with Des O’Connor.

[NOTE – although ‘defective eyesight’, ‘driving distracted’ and generally ‘not looking properly’ seem likely reasons to explain the ‘Looked But Failed To See’ LBFTS error where drivers don’t see approaching bikes, when I began to look into the issue in more depth it occurred to me that the vast majority of drivers DO see the vast majority of bikes. If they didn’t, we’d not make it far past the first junction.

In total, there are around 350 motorcycle fatalities and some 3000 injuries each year, but they are the result of ALL crashes, not just those at junctions – they total around 100 per annum. But what about encounters that DON’T end in crashes? If we think about how many cars there are on the road (around 40 million) and how many bikes there are (between 1 and 2 million), consider how many junctions every biker passes on every ride, then work out how many times bikes pass through junctions where a car could turn, the number of POTENTIAL collisions that never happen is truly enormous – I don’t think anyone has actually attempted to do the sum. The only conclusion we can make is that drivers DO see nearly every bike when it needs to be seen. And if that’s the case, the only rational explanation is that nearly all drivers DO look properly on nearly every occasion. We can lay to bed the ‘not looking properly’ explanation – it’s a handy myth.]

There is the driver who does see you but chooses the wrong course of action – is the driver inexperienced, merely incompetent, or not used to the vehicle being driven? Ever had a car towing a caravan pull out in front of you and wondered why? I never get anywhere near hire vans for the same kind of reason…

There is the experienced and overconfident driver who looks, thinks he has seen everything but “blanked” the bike because he only sees what he expects to see. New drivers and experienced drivers score very differently in hazard perception tests – new drivers check EVERYTHING in sight but cannot prioritise, experienced drivers check SELECTIVELY, prioritise better but often miss the unusual (ie the bike)…

[NOTE – it turns out there’s an explanation for this too. It doesn’t take long for all road users – bikers included – to develop a different strategy for emerging onto busy roads to the one we’re taught. Rather than the search for vehicles (which is what we think we’re doing), we’re actually all searching for the gaps between them. We all do it, drivers and riders alike. Mostly, it works.]

There is the driver who makes a conscious decision to use you as the gap in the traffic, knowing you will give way – “the bike is softer than a 44 tonner” approach…

[NOTE – I looked into that, too. Evidence from insurance statistics – who you might expect to be looking for a reason to pin a collision on the other driver – suggests it’s actually very rare for a driver to pull out deliberately. We riders tend to interpret it that way because we frequently see the driver appearing to look at us – “I made eye contract but he / she still pulled out” is a common post-crash statement. But as you’ll see if you follow up the SOBS website and check out how the eye actually has a tiny zone of clear, colour vision and sharp focus, it’s entirely likely that what we thought was eye contact, was actually the driver was looking in our direction but focused on the vehicle or gap behind us. I mention this below.]

Even given that the driver knows what to look for, is actively looking for it, knows what to do and isn’t a chancer, doesn’t mean he’ll see you coming. There are a number of reasons.

Most modern cars have huge blind spots:
take a look at the size of the A pillar alongside the windscreen on a modern car. They are designed to make the safety cage of the car rigid in an accident and stop the roof from folding up – it’s no coincidence they are the size of girders!
take a look at the pillar behind the driver’s head where the doors come together – again it’s huge
take a look at the pillar behind the rear window – once again it is part of the safety cage
Depending on the angle the car takes up, it’s quite possible the driver cannot see through you one of these obstructions, and there is always roadside furniture like telegraph poles, trees and letter boxes – if you can’t see his eyes, he cannot see you.

[NOTE – and since I wrote this nearly two decades ago, the A and B pillars have got even thicker as a result of new crash protection requirements. It turns out that around one-in-five collisions actually fall into the ‘looked but COULD NOT see’ category. In the run-up to the collision, although the driver was searching for approaching vehicles, the rider simply hadn’t put the bike in a place where the driver could see it.]

But drivers still don’t see you when they are looking straight at you and you are in clear view. Why not? Two possible causes. An accident analysis I saw the other day suggested that a contributory factor was “visual clutter” – there was so much going on in the direction the driver was looking that she simply didn’t see the bike. The brain was incapable of processing all the information being thrown at it in the time available and bits went astray. Unfortunately, amongst that lost info was the bike.

[NOTE – this phenomenon of processing information has been investigated in other fields – notable aviation – and the sum of the tasks that have to be performed is known as ‘workload’. Only recent has research in workload in driving been carried out, and it shows that in typical driving situations, there’s too much for the human brain to process all at once. So we ‘task-shed’ and focus on only part of the driving task. The very latest research (September 2019) suggests the more that’s going on, the more likely drivers are to forget what they saw a moment earlier. Motorcycles seem to be particularly prone to going missing. This is not carelessness or ‘not looking properly’ either. It’s simply the way the human brain evolved which limits our ability to process complex information.]

The second possibility is down to the way the eye and the brain work in tandem to process visual information. It may mean we see things which aren’t there or be blind to things that are. Even a conscientious driver, looking carefully, may misinterpret what he sees.

The central part of the retina is what sees detail in sharp focus – it’s why you have to look directly at a piece of paper to read what is written on it, but both this and the zone outside this is very sensitive to movement. Try this simple experiment – your eyes will have to move word by word to read this sentence, but if you move the mouse you can see it move over the whole of the screen wherever your eyes are focussed.

[NOTE – and there’s a bit more to this than I realised at the time. As our eyes move to points of interest (the words in this case), they move in jumps and pauses – saccades and fixations. The fixations allow us to focus and pick out the detail of the letters so we read the word. What’s not obvious – although we’ve known about it since the 19th century – is that as the eyes move in a saccade, the visual system shuts down. We’re effectively blind as our eyes move between fixations. It’s known as saccadic masking and is now at last being recognised as a real problem when drivers are turning their heads and looking left and right at junctions.]

As you ride, you’ll often spot motion out of the corner of your eye (a plastic bag flapping in a hedge or a car approaching in a side road) whereas the driver looking back at you is using the sharp focus part of the eye and may not see you because you don’t appear to be moving.

[NOTE – the brain is good at picking out movement in peripheral vision – it’s how our visual system is designed – but approaching a junction on the bike, we’re on a near-collision course with the driver looking in our direction. That means we’re virtually motionless with respect to the background scene, and that means we create no lateral movement to trigger the brain’s motion detection system. It’s known as ‘motion camouflage’. Interestingly this phenomenon has been known about for decades by animal scientists, sailors and fighter pilots, but only recently does it seem to have been realised it applies to drivers too.]

How might he miss seeing you? The brain spots familiar objects by using pattern recognition – as social animals we are very good at recognising faces. As drivers/riders we’ve trained our brain to recognise other important shapes – the silhouettes of another vehicle, the outline of a pedestrian, the pattern of a road sign. The problem is that we learn to recognise these patterns as whole – break up the outline and it vanishes – try recognising a face which is missing the eyes or the mouth! One VD contributor posted an excellent picture of a ‘dazzle-camouflaged’ ship painted in bold strips of grey and blue – it was invisible not because it blended into the background but because the strips gave the eye false outlines to try to make sense of, none of which said ‘SHIP’.

[NOTE – once again, this is ‘old news’ in science but the effects of ‘disruptive camouflage’ is only now beginning to be recognised as an issue. It’s particularly a problem for motorcyclists because our bikes and clothing are often multi-coloured. It’s likely it’s a significant factor in ‘looked but FAILED TO SEE’ errors. Even supposedly hi-vis clothing often fails to create a recognisable silhouette for the driver to see, which may well explain why there’s little evidence that hi-vis clothing has had any positive effect in reducing the proportion of junction collisions.]

When approaching a waiting driver, in certain lights conditions or against certain backgrounds, part of your ‘bike plus rider’ outline may vanish – so the shape that reaches the part of the brain busily processing this information doesn’t shout ‘BIKE’ to the driver’s conscious reactions. If you are approaching head on, without adding movement across the background, there is nothing to alert them to the fact they have missed a vital clue until you get very close and the angle of view starts to change.

[NOTE – this problem of foreground and background colours blending is known as ‘contrast camouflage’. Guess what? We’ve known about it and exploited it for military purposes for a couple of centuries. But road safety has focused entirely on the false premise that if riders wear bright colours they’ll be more visible. Put your yellow hi-vis vest on, then stand in front of a field of oil seed rape in flower, or a yellowing autumn hedge, and see if you stand out. Two of the most important pieces of understanding are:

it’s the CONTRAST that matters, not the colour

the background changes moment by moment and so does our conspicuity

If you want a daytime hi-vis colour that works reasonably well in most environments, it’s not Saturn yellow, but pink! I have been suggesting this for well over a decade, so when I took a BikeSafe day with the Met last year, I was mildly amused to the team suggesting pink hi-vis. I wonder where they got that idea?]

And as if all that weren’t enough that could go wrong, even if the driver does spot you, how does he go about judging your speed and distance?

Well, if an object is heading straight at you, it’s very difficult – switch to sport for a moment. If you’ve ever tried to make the high steepling catch where the batsman has hit the ball straight up, you’ll know that it’s not that easy to judge the catch as it comes down again – even the best players make a mess of it. You have to use an estimate of distance based on what your experience tells you about the apparent size of the object, then use the rate of change of the size of that object to determine what speed you think it’s approaching at, and when you need to cushion the catch.

By contrast a straightforward lob to the boundary is relatively easy to catch even if you have to run to meet it because we use the movement of the ball across the background to give us an extra angle to calculate where it is in 3D.

The driver sitting looking at a bike heading towards him is in the motoring equivalent of that up-and-down catch. At the high closing speeds possible on a motorcycle, it becomes almost impossible to judge distance, speed and time at all accurately.

[This is what I’ve called the ‘looked, saw and MISJUDGED’ error. But as well as the technical difficulty of accurately judging speed and distance, there’s an extra problem. Put a bike side-by-side with a car or van at the same distance and travelling at the same speed, and observers will almost always think the van will arrive first. Looking at the bike, they think they have more time, and make the mistake of pulling out. This has become known as the ‘size-arrival effect’.]

And whilst we’re digesting that, another thing to consider… it’s not just driver to your left you have to worry about, what about the driver turning across your path from the opposite direction? You have little time to react and are likely to add the oncoming vehicle’s speed to your own, and the driver has to factor in their own speed and distance to the turning point. That accident accounts for a whopping 21% of Killed and Seriously Injured in London, despite being the minority accident. By contrast, vehicles emerging from the left account for only 7% of KSI.

[This was the big lesson I personally learned from BikeSafe. I had no idea that the oncoming driver turning across the rider’s path was such a big killer. It’s been something I’ve been flagging up ever since.]

Where’s my coat, I’ll think I’ll take the bus instead!

POSTSCRIPT – Of course back in the early 2000s, what I wrote here kicked off a lot of negative feedback and some stinging criticism, typically suggesting I was “absolving the driver of responsibility”, or “making a victim of the rider”. It wasn’t just motorcyclists either – I was even told by a road safety officer that I was undoing all their good work promoting hi-vis clothing. Even in 2012, my presentation was often greeted with polite disbelief and shakes of the head.

But in the eight years since the first talk, other people have picked up the message and begun to run with it. Biker Down itself has gone national, and is delivered by over half of all fire services, many of which use a version of my SOBS presentation. A year or so after the first SOBS presentations on Biker Down, an RAF pilot compiled a very good article for a London cyclists’ magazine – I still reference that article regularly. And more recently, an excellent video has appeared online under the ‘Fortnine’ moniker on YouTube which covers much of what SOBS began explaining in 2012. Somewhat to my surprise, even BikeSafe in London has begun to cover some of the issues explained by SOBS.

As a result, riders are learning terms like ‘motion camouflage’ and ‘saccadic masking’ and the science isn’t quite so much of a mystery any more. The more of us saying the same thing, the more credible the message becomes and I’ve seen that in the response to my presentations, how attitudes have begun to shift.

Perhaps not surprisingly, as more people become familiar with the concepts of visual perception, critics have now started to say that SOBS is nothing new – that we knew all this already. I certainly don’t claim that I have contributed any original research to SOBS, but what is unique is that SOBS is most certainly the FIRST TIME anyone anywhere has attempted to assemble the research and present it ALL TOGETHER and in a form that is COMPREHENSIBLE to the average rider.

I personally have delivered the SOBS presentation to several thousand attendees on Biker Down in Kent, and many of the fire service Biker Down teams deliver a version of SOBS. Outside of Biker Down, I’ve personally taken SOBS to rider groups across the south of England (so drop me a line if you’d like a presentation delivered to your own group).

And in 2018 and 2019, SOBS achieved international recognition as I travelled to the other side of the world, to New Zealand. At the invitation of the NZ Transport Agency, the Ride Forever training scheme and the Accident Compensation Corporation, I was a keynote speaker on the Shiny Side Up roadshow that toured the county in both years, giving my talk to hundreds of Kiwi bikers at over a dozen venues on both trips.

Posted on

16. A Moment of Inattention? Or a lack of attention to fixing problems?

A universal and ongoing challenge in motorcycling is understanding how human instinct, fear, and attention interact with skill under real-world stress, what’s now referred to as ‘human factors’. Even experienced riders can find themselves in situations where instinct and fear override skill. This article explores a real-world braking emergency to illustrate how inattention, poor anticipation, and stress responses interact, why emergency skills alone aren’t enough, and how proactive hazard assessment and mindset can prevent dangerous situations before they occur. The article’s core message — that accidents often result from cognitive and attentional failures rather than purely technical deficiencies — remains as relevant today as ever and explains why neuroscience matters to motorcyclists.

A Moment of Inattention? Or a lack of attention to fixing problems?

The following was posted in a discussion group by a friend of mine, Don Kime, an instructor in the States. What can be learned? The rider identifies some of the problems for himself. So why’s he not done something about sorting it out? And here’s the really scary bit: “Here we go again.” So he’s been in this position before. What’s he not learned from the previous incidents?

“More harrowing braking experiences. This is beginning to scare me. I just got back from a ride and was on a two lane, fairly straight and wide, country road. I was following a pickup doing somewhere around 75mph. He was about four car lengths or more ahead of me. I was just enjoying the ride, as usual. Next thing I know all I see is brake lights and I am closing on his tail gate fast. Here we go again.

“I immediately get down on both brakes, and the back wheel promptly locks up. At first I am not really sure which wheel is sliding until the back end starts to wag back and forth. At this point I know I need to be squeezing the front brake harder than I am, but for some reason I am afraid I am going to slide the front wheel and loose control. In retrospect, I don’t think I was anywhere near loosing traction on the front. I am in the grips of fear and (again) fixated on the tail gate of the truck.

“For a moment I am sure I am not going to be able to stop in time, but I feel like I can at least get my speed down before I impact. I continue on the front brake with the rear locked. I know I should have released the rear, but at the moment there was no way I was going to let off either brake. I managed to bear down a bit harder on the front once I realized that it was the rear that was sliding and not the front. I brought the bike to a stop about 10ft behind the truck in a cloud of smoke from my rear tire. (I flat spotted the heck out of my new Macadam!)

“The pickup had just stopped dead in the middle of the road to make a right turn (without signalling). I don’t know if he had slammed on his brakes hard or if I had not seen them when they first came on. All I remember is going about 70 and seeing brake lights and a truck that had come to a complete stop right in front of me.

I made several rookie mistakes (again). First of all, I made no attempt to avoid. I fixated. I probably could have gone around, but once I locked the back wheel that was no longer an option. I don’t remember if there was any oncoming traffic or not. I don’t think I had time to look. Second, I did not brake the front wheel aggressively enough. My first instinctive reaction was to jam down the brake pedal which resulted in the rear wheel slide and making me panic. I think if I had used only the front brake I would have stopped much sooner. But for some reason, I can’t seem to keep myself from stomping on the rear brake in an emergency. Right after the incident I did three practice emergency braking tests. I was able to bring the bike to a controlled stop all three times in a distance much shorter than what I had just done. But I was not in a real emergency situation.

Something happens to my brain when I am in a real emergency situation that prevents me from thinking clearly and braking correctly. Fear, plain in simple. Maybe I just need to practice more so it is second nature. My brain just seems to lock up in panic situations. I need to somehow learn to control my fear instead of letting it control me.”

So what can we learn? What are the issues?

Let’s take a moment to think about what the rider has for himself identified as a problem – his braking technique. Notice he said he practiced three stops immediately after the incident and managed them fine. It should be obvious that he was not familiar with the using the brakes hard. Practicing emergency stops after the event is too late!

But here’s the real problem: “Something happens to my brain when I am in a real emergency situation… I made no attempt to avoid. I fixated. I probably could have gone around, but once I locked the back wheel that was no longer an option.”

Once in a panic situation, self-preservation and instinct took over from planned riding. Why? Because we cannot easily practice emergencies! As there’s no actual emergency in a practice emergency stop, the risk is that if we don’t see it coming soon enough to brake hard consciously, our unconscious ‘Survival Reactions’ take over. These are the primitive and instinctive responses the threat, such as target fixation, freezing and over-braking. Keith Code first talked about this in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books. And it’s actually a dramatic limitation of training in emergency techniques. We know what to do in an emergency, but we don’t know how we’ll react in an emergency.

So, how do we prevent survival reactions taking over?

The first option is not to follow so close. He said: “I was following a pickup doing somewhere around 75mph. He was about four car lengths or more ahead of me”. If he’d really been that close, he would have hit the back of the truck before he had even applied the brakes, so let’s make some allowance for hazy perceptions of following distance after the event, but it’s still clear he was too close. If we’re to avoid triggering survival reactions, we need to see the vehicle ahead begin to slow, and still have time to think.

How far back is that?

Well that depends on something else. Our expectations. He said: “The pickup had just stopped dead in the middle of the road to make a right turn (without signalling).” Well, that’s not exactly unusual is it? Vehicles – including motorcycles – stop. Our rider had failed to anticipate it might happen. And that means it was a SURPRISE! And SURPRISE! is the trigger for survival reactions. More about this on the No Surprise No Accident website.

It’s hard to give hard and fast distances but in essence if we’re taken by SURPRISE we can add anything from 1 second to 3 seconds to our stopping distance. That’s not because we’re braking less effectively, it’s because it takes that long to actually BEGIN to react. The Highway Code talks about ‘reaction time’ and ‘stopping distance’, but ignores this ‘recognition time’. Whilst we can certainly stop in less than the near-100 metre distance the Highway Code says we should allow IF we anticipate the need to stop and hit the brakes immediately, if we freeze for three seconds, we’ll have travelled no less than 90 metres before even beginning to brake!

What we actually need is a riding plan that factors in things going wrong before it actually happens. Read this: “I was just enjoying the ride, as usual… I don’t remember if there was any oncoming traffic or not. I don’t think I had time to look.” Do you begin to see the problem? We all tend to drift at times but a lack of focus on the riding task is dangerous. Alertness can’t be sacrificed for relaxation. He shouldn’t have had to think about looking, he should have been aware of other traffic As Don says “I don’t see this as a ‘braking’ issue – I see it as a ‘thinking’ issue”.

Finally let’s look at Don’s summary of the event.

“First, as many of you have said, unless the rider was planning on overtaking, his following distance was far too close. If he was planning on overtaking, he should have been fully aware of all traffic ahead including any sideroads or driveways or other situations which could produced just what happened. I have learned to never put myself in an overtaking posture when there could be reason for the driver to brake for an unsignalled turn, an animal, bad roadway surface, etc., etc.

“Assuming that the rider was not overtaking, it was a potentially disastrous mistake to follow so closely, but this was exaggerated by a very lackadaisical attitude toward having full information on traffic conditions ahead – together, in my opinion, a potentially deadly combination.

“I see this as 90% of the learning opportunity from this situation. Most emergency braking, in my opinion, results from this kind of failure, and I’m not sure that all the braking practice or discussion in the world assures a rider of righting this wrong. I’m not sure how any of us, including me, will react in a true ‘the collision is imminent’ braking situation. I’ve fortunately not had to find out as ‘heavy braking’ has always been enough. Nonetheless, I practice maximum braking as often as possible.

“However, it is my personal preference to concentrate the vast majority of my efforts at avoiding this situation. I personally believe that this is the only right answer.

“My final thought on this is that… with proper anticipation and attention to defensive motorcycle riding these kinds of situations do not have to be the norm. I don’t recall when last I had a traffic situation ‘surprise’ me. …and I don’t say this to blow my horn as a rider. There are many far better riders than me. I simply practice religiously a system of riding which attempts to separate me from situations at which this particular rider failed. In my opinion, this is the difference between motorcycling being a ‘relatively’ safe, wonderfully challenging and enjoyable activity and one which can kill you very quickly. At the same time, I am fully aware that, in spite of all our best efforts, there is one out there that can get any of us. That’s why I wear the gear and am very appreciative of good luck.”

My final comment is to repeat what another contributor said: “The old pilot axiom is that superior pilots are the ones who never get in a position where they need to use their superior skills”.

Absolutely.

Posted on

15. Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

Motorcycle crashes aren’t random. They follow patterns that haven’t changed for decades, yet many riders continue to repeat the same mistakes and the persistent human factors behind motorcycle crashes are overconfidence, poor anticipation, and failure to learn. Modern studies in accident analysis still emphasise that cognitive biases, overconfidence, and misjudgment are major contributors to crashes. Encouraging riders to ask “what could go wrong” and analyse their own role in crashes is a principle that should underpin all modern advanced rider training.

Getting it wrong is easy, learning from a mistake seems a lot harder

However good we are, we all make mistakes. Provided we survive them, then do we learn from them? It’s a good question and insurance industry statistics suggest that most riders don’t. Riders who have had an accident in the previous three years are three times more likely than average to have another accident in the following year – insurance companies do not load the premiums of riders who crash for no reason! And here’s something else to think about. We don’t have to learn from our own experience, we can look at where other riders crash, and historically we still have the same accident types as motorcyclists have always had. Here are the Big Three. Collisions at junctions. Crashes on corners. Overtaking accidents. Look at statistics from the 1950s and 2010s and you’ll find nothing has changed. What does that tell you? It should suggest we don’t learn well from experience – either our own, or someone else’s.

Have you had a ‘moment’ recently?

Have a think. Ask yourself some questions.

Did you see it coming, and if you did were you able to react in time and take avoiding action? If you couldn’t take evasive action, why not?

If you didn’t see it coming, what were you looking at? Did you fail to spot the clues to what was about to happen or did you fail to anticipate the likely sequence of events and consequences of what you were seeing?

We should know by now that the most common motorcycle crash is a collision between a bike and a car. But have a think on this. If the driver failed to spot the bike, the car was almost always where the rider could see it. Riders usually report that “the driver didn’t see me” and not that “I didn’t see the car”. In fact, they often say something along the lines of “the driver was looking right at me”. So the rider saw the vehicle they were about to collide with, no problem.

So what was going on in the rider’s head at that moment? Do they simply glance at the car, then leave it to the driver to sort it all out? That certainly seems to be the case in most car : bike collisions.

Here’s another example. A typical overtaking and filtering crash occurs when the driver turns right across the bike’s path. The rider’s cop-out is usually that “the driver should have checked his mirror properly” or “the driver didn’t signal before turning”. But think about it. If a car COULD turn right, why is the rider overtaking? Did the rider fail to spot the junction or driveway? Or did the rider simply assume that the driver wouldn’t turn?

If we haven’t anticipated a dangerous situation, then it’s our mistake as much as anyone else’s. And many bike crashes are down to the rider alone. Most cornering crashes and many overtakes that go wrong result from really poor decisions by the rider and the rider alone. Even when legally it’s the fault of another road user that we found ourselves in a difficult or dangerous situation, we should be looking for ways not to get into that situation in the first place. There’s no benefit to blaming the other road user from the stretcher.

If we don’t ride in a state of mind where we are looking for things to go wrong, then we WILL be caught out by unexpected – and very much routine – crashes. If we habitually say “it was the other guy’s fault” or “there was nothing I could do”, then we are fooling ourselves and will learn nothing. We need to assess our riding critically. Yet many riders find it almost impossible to admit to making a mistake. “The corner’s surface was rubbish”, or “the driver coming the other way was speeding”.

As I mentioned right at the beginning, we have the same crashes as we always have always had. Why haven’t we learned?

Posted on

05. Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

In part one of this mini-series, we took a look at an accident that happened to one of my trainees on her bike test. She had just performed a perfect emergency stop in tricky, damp conditions in front of the examiner when a moment later she locked up the front brake and fell off when a car pulled out in front of her. The question we need to answer is that with all the training we did, why did she revert to instinct and grab the front brake when confronted with a real emergency? My suggestions might surprise you but they have a solid grounding in sports psychology. That’s why the concept has been part of my approach to rider training since 1997.

If you missed Part One, you can find it here.

Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

My trainee had — in theory — been trained to brake in an emergency. Unfortunately, as the crash demonstrated, she hadn’t. She’d simply been trained to use a hard braking technique. What she hadn’t been trained to cope with was an emergency where hard braking was her ‘get out of trouble’ card. And this is the problem — learning technical skills is only one part of the problem. We have to understand how the brain responds to a threat, and right now, that’s barely covered in rider training at any level.

There’s a simple answer. She had the skill and knowledge to perform a perfectly good emergency stop in a situation she knew and expected, but when the car pulled out it was a novel situation. There was no ‘ritual’ automatic response that involved controlled use of the brakes. The amygdala — sometimes called the brain’s “survival centre” and historically referred to as the “reptilian brain” — detected a threat and took over. It reverted to the most basic collision‑avoidance strategy and triggered the panic grab of the brakes.

In riding terms, a ‘ritual’ is simply a learned motor sequence — like changing gear — that the brain can run automatically without conscious thought when it recognises the right cue. Once learned, the amygdala can trigger these responses instantly when it recognises the right cue — for gear changing, it would be the sound of the engine revving. With just a bit of experience, we don’t need to glance at the rev counter. Quite simply, emergency stop training only teaches the amygdala half the job. It learns how to brake hard, but not when to do it. The ‘cue’ is missing.

So we have to ensure the amygdala learns the essential ‘cue’.

Experience is one possible teacher. After locking the brakes and maybe falling off a few times, we learn to appreciate the risk of personal harm. We learn that staying on the bike hurts less than sliding beside it. Although it isn’t practice in the sense that we consciously know what we were doing, it is still learning by experience. We “burn” an alternative pathway to the instinctive reaction of grabbing the brakes. Even if we’re surprised by the next car that pulls out, the amygdala now has a better ritual pathway than its basic fight‑or‑flight wiring and follows that pathway to make a controlled stop.

Thus we defeat the “brake as hard as possible” instinct by learning to moderate our braking. Been there, done that. It’s still unconscious and unplanned, but it’s no longer instinctive. It shows we do learn by experience and this alternative pathway is what enables us to beat Code’s Survival Reactions that are triggered by the half-trained amygdala.

Let’s think about my test candidate again. The cue for her emergency stop in front of the examiner was the visual “hand up” signal. We’d trained her amygdala to run through the correct ritual response: shut throttle, gently apply the front, gently apply the rear, progressively squeeze the front, clutch in, foot down.

But when the real emergency developed, the cue was missing. We hadn’t taught her to link the emergency stop ritual to the trigger of an emerging car. When the car threatened her space, she was taken by surprise. Her amygdala wasn’t programmed to use the emergency stop ritual in this event, so it fell back on its primitive job — instinctive avoidance of harm via fight‑or‑flight — and she grabbed the front brake.

OK, you’ve probably spotted the problem. How do we train ourselves to deal with emergencies without experiencing them — which implies we have to survive the emergency? As I said, after a few front‑wheel lock‑ups, I personally learned not to grab the brakes as the in-built primitive pathways get overwritten my new learned behaviour. But learning by crashing really isn’t an ideal way to learn. It’s painful, expensive and occasionally termina.

Sports psychology shows the way forward. Sportspeople often have to compete in situations they can’t practise in. Tennis players and golfers spend their lives playing in front of a few dozen people, so appearing at Wimbledon or the Open triggers stress and fear of failure. Their performance collapses — a phenomenon known as choking. Their carefully learned techniques go out the window. So they use visualisation to overcome the problem.

At its most basic, visualisation means sitting back and mentally running through the steps needed to deal with the anticipated situation. The brain can be fooled into believing this is “real” experience and burns new pathways that avoid choking and instinctive reactions. The more vivid the visualisation, the more effective the training.

And that’s how we can learn to deal with situations we’ve not yet experienced and can’t practise realistically. We can use the same technique as golfers and tennis players imagining the winning shot to fool our amygdala into thinking “I’ve been here before and I know what to do” when a car really does pull out. That’s how we avoid survival reactions taking over.

And here’s something else — why wait until the car is pulling out? Why not teach ourselves to react to the tell‑tale signs of a junction — road signs, breaks in hedgerows, white paint at the roadside? Why not get into the habit of covering the brakes and horn when we first see the car? This way, rather than waiting for the car beginning to move, we use the sight of the car as the cue that trigger a proactive response.

The more tasks we routinely leave to the amygdala, the more attention we have left for everything else. Just as a competent rider isn’t consciously changing gear, a really good rider lets the amygdala hunt for hazards too.

If visualisation techniques had been combined with real emergency stop training, my trainee would have had a far better chance of reacting appropriately to the first real emergency she faced. Visualisation would have allowed her mind to connect the practical skills she’d learned through repetition with the real‑world trigger.

Unfortunately, visualisation is still missing from rider training at all levels.