[Motofool]

Originally Posted by flynjay

Looking where you want to go rotates your shoulders in the desired direction causing you to press on the appropriate bar. I never think "press the on the handlebar" to do anything. That is a training technique to teach the muscle memory on changing direction. Once you have some experience you just decide where to go and the bike reacts accordingly.

If you keep staring at the object you are trying to avoid, no amount of pressing bars is going to help as you're going end up crossed up on the bike and it will continue to go straight.

Jason,

In my experience, it is a little more complicated than that: the bike doesn't go where you voluntarily look just because you look, it takes counter-steering.

The bike goes where you involuntarily look and usually because you are not counter-steering much or at all.

Not that I want to argue, but I would like to correct what I think is an incorrect understanding of the "you go where you look" that we all learned at the MSF course.

As we all know, target fixation is a survival reaction; which means that only happens when we believe that we are in danger.

For relaxed riding, that simply doesn't work that way.
I can look and turn my head at will, while the bike rolls much more than a few feet, without deviating from the trajectory that my brain has planned.

In a panic reaction, "we go where we look" simply because the fear stops us from looking anywhere else.

Keith Code explained better:

"Instinctively, we track and hold potential danger in the center of our gaze, an area about one finger’s width at arm’s length. If the object of our fixation is in motion, the eyes automatically target-track it until we can determine its direction and velocity.

Unfortunately, the evils known as target fixation and tunnel vision often come in pairs. Once the pair attacks, in less than a heartbeat, we can lose our depth perception and our valuable peripheral vision.

The survival instinct’s logic is impeccable: It wants to know our path will or will not intersect with the pothole, apex curbing or another bike or car. That requires some prediction of, “Where will I be at that moment in time?” The degree of certainty you have with the answer bolsters or rips apart your confidence.

If your sense of it is vague, your survival reactions spring into action. This creates stress, jacks up your adrenaline, changes your blood flow, tenses your core and other muscles, interrupts breathing and either freezes you in the doubt of the moment or promotes nervous, poorly timed and unneeded corrections like stabbing the brake or chopping the gas.

Every rider has personal experience with the problems created by the human visual system. Wherever our attention is drawn, so are we. The object becomes our focus, making it easy to miss just about everything else. We don’t see an escape route around the pothole or we miss choosing a good line because that dark patch of pavement hooked our attention for a moment.

In riding, a moment is a long time. Two lazy finger-snaps at a mere 30 mph eat up 44 feet of space. In a simple 90-degree corner on a two-lane road, if you missed your turn-in point by that much, you’d be off the road or into the other lane. Blink an eye (.3 -.4 of a second) just before the brake marker on the front straight at Phillip Island at 200 mph and you’ll go 90-120 feet past it!"

Read more: http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/fe...#ixzz27VXG3agL

"Driver training in the past has dictated that scanning the road in front of us is good. But how rapidly should it be done? What are we scanning to find? What do we do with it once we’ve found it?

Our instinctual visual system is geared to spot danger. Any unpredictability about where we are now, and where we will wind up, triggers our survival instincts. Reaction times to recognize a situation are typically in the .35-second range. In near-panic, that same visual instinct commands us to look at what will happen in that same period of time and space. Target fixation can be the unwanted, negative result.

There may be rare exceptions, but riders don’t target-fixate on things that are out in the distance. Our survival instinct wants to know what is going to happen within the bounds of its minimum recognition time to a danger. Unfortunately, target fixation isn’t really looking; it’s more of a hypnotic transfixing. At 30 mph we travel 44 feet per second (fps). That .35-sec. is 15 feet, or about two bike lengths, ahead of you. That isn’t enough time or space to make an intelligent evaluation and initiate effective corrective actions. Concurrently, we often lose our peripheral field of view which gives us vital information on our speed and is essential to our depth perception.

To combat these problems, you can experiment with ways to retrain the system and gain positive control over it. This will help you establish a “scan rate” to improve your visual comprehension of the space in front of you."

Read more: http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/fe...#ixzz27VWph0Wc