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CrowdScience: How do you balance on a bicycle?

Discussion & Talk

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29/04/2022 GMT

How do you balance on a bicycle?

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, How do you balance on a bicycle?

It’s like riding a bike – you never forget. But why not?

What’s going on when we ride a bicycle, how do we stay upright? CrowdScience investigates

How do we stay up when we ride a bicycle? Lots of us can do it without even thinking about it, but probably very few of us can say exactly HOW we do it. Well, CrowdScience listener Arif and his children Maryam and Mohammed from India want to understand what’s going on in our heads when go for a cycle, and how we learn to do it in the first place.

Presenter Marnie Chesterton is on the case, tracking down a neuroscientist studying how our brains and bodies work together to keep us balanced whether we’re walking or trying to ride a bicycle. She learns about the quirks of bicycle engineering from researchers in the Netherlands who are part of a lab entirely devoted to answering this question. In the process falling off of some unusual bicycles and uncovering the surprising truth that physics might not yet have a proper answer. And we peer deeper into our brains to find out why some memories last longer than others, whether some people can learn quicker than others and the best way to learn a new skill. 

Presented by Marnie Chesterton and Produced by Emily Bird for the BBC World Service.

Featuring: 
Kathleen Cullen, Johns Hopkins University, USA 
Jason Moore, University of Technology Delft, The Netherlands 
Lara Boyd, University of British Columbia, Canada 
Rado Dukalski, University of Technology Delft, The Netherlands
Josie and Freesia, Pedal Power

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