They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but that old adage doesn’t apply to the backwards-steering bike built by Brock University Faculty of Education Professor Robert McGray.<\/p>\n
In fact, the backwards bicycle he made with the help of Brock\u2019s machine shop is so perplexing, most people can\u2019t ride it. The bicycle is the same as a traditional bike except for gears attached to the handlebars which make it steer in the opposite direction of what you would expect. On Tuesday, members of the media and a handful of Brock staff members tried to ride McGray’s creation,\u00a0which was inspired by a similar project from the YouTube science channel\u00a0SmarterEveryDay<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to go right, you turn (the handlebars) to the left,\u201d says McGray, who built the bike to help research how our brains learn new things.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the coolest things about my job is that I get to think about how adults learn,\u201d he says. \u201cHow do we learn behaviours or even ideas in ways we don\u2019t even know?\u201d<\/p>\n McGray figures about 200 people have tried riding the backwards bike and no one has been able to ride it successfully on their first attempt.<\/p>\n \u201cIt turns out that offering an explanation as to why it\u2019s so hard to learn is almost as difficult as learning to ride the bike itself,\u201d McGray says.<\/p>\n