Originally Posted by
canklecat
BTW, I still say the premise is flawed for that Smarter Every Day episode on the backward bike.
It isn't harder to ride because of anything to do with our brains or learned skills. It's harder to ride because it defies physics and human ergonomics. Nobody would design a bike like that and ride it for long. A dumb design has nothing to do with unlearning or relearning, other than to make a pedantic point about acquiring a useless skill.
If your unfounded opinion were accurate, a person could train themselves to ride the backwards bike, then go back and forth between regular and backwards. But we can't. It is 100% learned skill, just as riding a bicycle in the conventional fashion is 100% learned skill. The way our brain works, you have to unlearn one to learn the other. It's not like being ambidextrous. Riding the backwards bike takes a completely different skillset than riding a conventional one. If it wasn't a matter of learning/unlearning, the son who figured it out significantly faster (due to having better neural plasticity) would have taken the same amount of time as the father.