Tag: responses

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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”.

Posted on

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.