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You'd tune up your bike for better performance, so why not tune up your brain?
Human behaviour contributes in many ways to traffic accidents. Studies have shown that a number of cognitive and psychological characteristics are key skills required for safe driving:
- reaction time
- short-term memory
- assessment of time, distance and speed
- focus/concentration
- hand-eye co-ordination
- width of field of vision
- visual scanning
How we perceive our own ability also has an effect:
- confidence level
- changing plans/inhibitions
There are areas of behaviour too, that contribute to poor driving and riding:
- risk-taking
- obeying traffic regulations
- divided attention
Survival Skills courses look beyond conventional motorcycle training and work with you to reinforce your strengths and improve the weaker areas.
I've been interested in the area of mental skills for many years, and from the very first, Survival Skills courses looked at the the mental side of riding, as well as the issues of perception of risk and
the likelihood of personal harm by individual riders.
Many interesting discussions occurred online, and as the Survival Skills courses developed from the crystallisation of my own riding experience and a leavening of 'Roadcraft', it became clear that riding
skills depend on a a three-cornered pyramid:
1) technical skills; can you handle the bike to put it where you want to be?
2) attitude; can you control impatience, aggression/victim mentality, and avoid "power struggles"?
3) knowledge; are your decisions based on a full understanding of:
a) the hazard
b) the various directions in which the situation may develop
c) the risk to you from each potential outcome
d) the potential for harm that may result if you cannot avoid it?
You then need a fourth prop - the 'brain training' techniques that allow the skills you've learned to "stick".
Both the practical Survival Skills course and the e-course cover all these four areas of learning. Obviously on the e-course I can't see students ride real-time (unless you visit me for an assessment ride), so you get a series of carefully constructed exercises to follow and report back on. A new development is to use on-bike video footage provided by the trainee and analyse that.
I've also put together a Sport Psychology course which goes into more detail on the 'brain training' stuff, and looks at how to use techniques like focus and centering used by sports people for years to get "in the zone", as well as explored topics like the physiology of the body (muscle memory), visual perception, and brain/vision interaction in terms of how decision making is handled by the three different parts of the brain:
- slow, real-time "look, recognise, consider, decide" neo-cortex
- fast, "learned response" mid-brain
- blindingly quick "survival instinct" lizard brain
I've also written about many of the topics in the "Survival Skills (Course Notes)" e-book, and in the free Riding Skills pages you can find the "Spidy Sense" article I wrote about it for "The Road" (the MAG journal) back in Dec 06 here:
(there's also another companion piece, "Armchair Riding" that went in the next issue). I also put both of them up on here 2 years ago.
Whatever you ride, however you ride, wherever you ride, there's always a place for training your brain. Riding really is in the mind!
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