Tag: survival reactions

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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.

 

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04. Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 1 

Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 1

I’m no longer involved in basic training, but this particular incident was a powerful lesson in the weakness of ‘skills training’. There’s a seductive simplicity to “teach the technique, practise the technique, repeat the technique, use the technique”. But when we look at real‑world crashes, real‑world behaviour, and real‑world human limitations, the weaknesses of skills‑only training become obvious.

Here’s the core truth; skills-only training improves what riders can do, but not what they choose to do. And that gap is where most crashes happen. Skills don’t change how we see the world. We can only react to what we notice. If we don’t spot the developing hazard, misinterpret what we see, or focus on the wrong thing, it’s easy to get mentally overloaded and either freeze under pressure (research indicates that it’s surprisingly common that riders simply don’t brake mid-emergency in which case the skill never gets used, or the skill breaks down under extreme pressure.

Skills-only training assumes the rider will recognise the moment to apply the skill. In reality, many riders don’t. That’s why modern bikes all have ABS and collision-avoidance radar is starting to appear.

And it was no coincidence that I called my post-test training school ‘Survival Skills, either. We need mental skills to ride too.

Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 1 

Some years ago, I was waiting for a candidate to come back from the Direct Access motorcycle test when the examiner turned up early minus the trainee. That’s normally a sign the trainee’s lost the examiner (it happens), the bike’s broken down (occasionally), or the bike’s been dropped and is too damaged to ride (not uncommon during the old on-road U turn – the brake or clutch levers can snap off).

In this case, he told me that she’d dropped the bike.

Naturally, I asked what had happened and if she was ok. He told me that she’d just been passing a parked car when a car had pulled out from a side turning just ahead of her, crossed close in front of her and accelerated away at high speed. She’d been forced to brake, and in doing so she’d locked the front wheel on the wet road and fallen off.

Fortunately, he continued, she was only bruised and the bike had only suffered a few additional dents and scrapes, but needed a new brake lever.

He continued: “She was a bit surprised when the car pulled out and had to brake hard on a damp surface, but the odd thing is we’d just done the emergency stop a couple of minutes earlier, and she did a perfect one”.

And that got me thinking.

Performing a good emergency stop for the examiner didn’t surprise me one iota. By the time my candidate got to the test, she had probably performed forty or fifty emergency stops back at the training school, we’d also soaked the pad for some of those, and just before her test, we’d carried out several more on a real road in the wet conditions she was just about to experience in front of the examiner.

So when I heard that she’d managed a perfect stop to the examiner’s signal, I wasn’t in the least surprised. She’d had all the training she needed to demonstrate to the examiner that she could perform them to a good standard, which is exactly what happened when the examiner got her to perform one.

But she fell off in a real-life emergency, the exact circumstance that her training was supposed to have equipped her to cope with. Why? Why couldn’t she use the skills she’d been trained to use when she REALLY needed them?

It was a puzzle for the examiner, but I have to say I wasn’t entirely surprised. After all, in pre-ABS days, riders fell off under hard braking quite regularly, even though the emergency stop has been a feature of the bike test for decades and rider training has covered effective emergency braking since the 1980s.

Let’s look at the training she’d received first.

She would have been introduced to basic braking technique and emergency stops on CBT, working up from very gentle, very slow ‘glides’ to a halt to more positive stops. Finally, she would have performed one on the road somewhere well out of the way of traffic. I’ve already mentioned how I’d covered emergency stops again on her DAS course, both in theory and in practice.

So, she should have been able to stop safely when the car pulled out, right?

Wrong.

Let’s have a look at the other factor; how the mind functions. And we’ll do that by asking another question: “what signal had she been trained to react to?”

The answer is that she had been trained to react to the sight of a person standing off to one side and signalling her to brake by raising a hand. She was looking for the examiner to signal her to stop, and when he raised his hand, it came as no surprise and she was confident in her control. That’s because we’d been practising them for days and she knew just what would happen and what to do, and in consequence performed a perfect emergency stop.

And now you should see the problem. Just like all the other tens of thousands of riders who take basic training and get a motorcycle licence each year — and the other million-plus riders on the UK’s roads — she hadn’t actually been trained to react to a real emergency. She had been trained to react using the right technique but to respond to the wrong stimulus.

I hear you ask: “surely you would have told her that cars will pull out in front of her and that’s why she was practicing emergency stops?” Of course we had, we’d talked about the situations in which she might need an emergency stop — I even had a playmat with roads on it, where I’d set up the classic SMIDSY at a junction.

I’m pretty sure that every other instructor of every other rider who’s fallen off in similar circumstances would have done the same. And of course, the DVSA’s books about safe riding covers the need for good emergency braking. But talking theory remains poor preparation for recognising that a real emergency is developing.

So, when the car pulled out mid-test, it simply didn’t trigger the mental response that would have led to the same ‘settle — squeeze — ease’ technique that stopped her briskly as she responded to the examiner. She had the skills training. But her brain training let her down.

Mid-emergency where harm threatens, we simply don’t have time to run through a logical thought process that:

1. starts with “oh look, that car’s beginning to pull out” 
2. reminds us that “ah yes, that’s why I did emergency stop practice”
3. ends with “let’s apply the brakes, smoothly, progressively and powerfully whilst compensating for the wet surface”

Skills training without cognitive stimulus training fails under real time pressure. As Keith Code explained in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books where he talked about ‘Survival Reactions’, in emergencies we revert to instinct. And instinct is often to grab a big handful. That’s why we still lock up the brakes in emergencies despite how we were trained.