Motorcycle Mind
(Editor’s note: Mark has graciously offered this preview of his new book for the Correspondence Theory audience. We appreciate his contribution and are excited for his new book. A review will be in the works. Stay tuned.)
THOR’S HAMMER
You of course know about Thor, the mythical god and his powerful hammer (named Mjölnir). The fun of the story is that when he’s not using his hammer it sits there on the ground, handle up, just asking to be picked up and wielded. So, your usual tough guys and other deities try to lift it, but, no matter how many steroids they’re on, it refuses to budge. Only Thor can move it.
One’s initial reactions to the story might be that (i) Thor’s hammer must be really heavy, and also that (ii) Thor must be super ripped, even stronger than all the other gods who have no luck lifting it.
But, in actuality, Thor’s unique ability to lift and use the hammer is because only he is worthy. The hammer is wieldable only by those having certain virtues and inner qualities. Thor somehow knows about this, and has lived his life so as to be worthy.
Motorcycles are like Thor’s Hammer.
Think back to before you knew how to ride (which might well be now!) and you would pass a motorcycle parked on the street. Didn’t some part of you want to hop on, grab the handles, turn it on, and release its power?
Except… you knew you couldn’t “lift” it. No way you could make that motorcycle move! And if you did somehow manage to get it to budge, you’d likely end up wrecking it and seriously injuring yourself and possibly others. The fact that the motorcycle was super heavy wasn’t the problem. The problem was that you weren’t “worthy,” and you knew it.
Had you passed a motor scooter, on the other hand, and the owner turned out to be an old friend and invited you to take a spin, you might well have considered it. You can hop on a motor scooter and get going pretty much immediately.
But, like Thor’s hammer, to move a motorcycle requires rare skill and knowledge. That’s what makes one worthy.
Sure, Thor’s Hammer flies, controls the weather, projects energy, gives him greater strength, creates force fields, heals, resurrects, and probably much more. But a motorcycle has a lot more powers than even most motorcyclists are consciously aware of, as we’ll get to over the course of this book.
And you can actually buy a motorcycle.
BICYCLE WITH AN ENGINE
But isn’t a motorcycle just a bicycle with an engine? What could be so interesting about these two ordinary things -- bikes and engines -- to be worthy of any fuss whatsoever, much less an entire book?
First, no, a motorcycle is definitely not simply a bicycle with an engine. An electric bike, on the other hand, most definitely is just a bicycle with an engine, and electric bikes most certainly are not motorcycles! The term ‘motorcycle’ is usually reserved for more heavy duty bikes with at least a pretty darn big engine. If you can get hit by a “bike with an engine” and not regret it for decades, then it’s probably not a motorcycle. And if you’re not worried you might kill yourself when you first try one out, then it’s also probably not a motorcycle. Motorcycles may be bicycles with engines, but motorcycles have got gravitas. Like, literally.
But -- even acknowledging the Thor’s hammer angle -- “a heavy duty bike with a pretty darn big engine” still sounds fairly ho hum. What’s there to really say about motorcycles?
Of course, we all know there is a lot to say about motorcycles! Motorcycles fill a uniquely romantic niche in culture. Motorcycles are the stuff of Easy Rider, Hell’s Angels, Harleys, Evil Knievel and Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. They’re fast, breathtaking, sexy, exhilarating, cool, thrilling, adventurous, free-spirited, fast, rugged, loud, powerful, sleek, custom, vintage, chrome-plated, wind-swept, leather-clad, independent, risky, exciting, nomadic, bold, rebellious, road-worn, passionate, empowering, gritty, dynamic, iconic, just to take the first bunch of adjectives ChatGPT spits out when asked for ones associated with motorcycles.
There is indeed something about motorcycles that places them in some completely far off stellar sphere compared to mere “heavy bicycles with a big engine.” You wouldn’t have picked this book up if you didn’t already know that.
So it is, then, a bit of a mystery:
What is it about motorcycles that make them so… amazing?
For starters, I may have been a little quick to suggest that bicycles and engines are both fairly uninspiring. Bicycles are, in fact, not uninspiring. We’ve come to think of them as boring because we’ve had them since we were little kids. But when you were a kid, you knew a truth you’ve long forgotten:
That bicycles are the kings of the human-powered vehicle world.
“Kings of what, exactly?” you ask. What are these other “human-powered vehicles” bicycles are kings over?
We all tend to forget, but most of us started our riding career not on bicycles, but on one or more of several variations on three and four wheeled rides. The simplest was the four-wheeled ride-on cars you push with your feet. Next up was the tricycle, which, although it was boring, the Big Wheel and Green Machine cousins were decidedly not boring, albeit childish.
The final precursor vehicle before a bicycle is an unusual one having four wheels in a diamond configuration: your bicycle with training wheels. And even this came in substages. It began with all four wheels on the road. But as you got more confident, the training wheels could be raised so that, at most, one set of three wheels would touch at any given time as you tilted from one set of three to another.
So, prior to getting to the much-desired bicycle stage of life, you probably went through several varieties of three- and four-wheelers.
And you only spent whatever time you did on those lame rides because you hadn’t yet figured out the bicycle. If you could have magically skipped all that and gone straight to a bicycle, you would have.
In fact, that recently became possible! Over the last couple decades there has been a great revolution in child human-engined rides, one finally allowing kids to skip all the totally uncool pre-bicycle transports. Someone had the bright idea to simply get rid of the pedals on bicycles, and it turns out even kids as young as 18 months can ride them! Pedal-less bicycles accordingly exploded on the toddler market. No one wants a tricycle or a clunky push or pedal car when you can skip straight to the top!
Bicycles are where it’s at. You knew this as a wee one.
And, once you made it to the bicycle stage, that was it! You reached the top. Sure, a few rare kids tried their hand at the unicycle, but not anyone we wanted to hang out with. There simply isn’t any next stage after the bicycle, other than bigger ones to fit your lanky gawky self, and ones with more gadgets.
Until, that is, you got to driving age, got your first car, and forever forgot what you knew a decade earlier: That two wheels are king.
But you didn’t fully forget. Some part of you knows what’s what. No matter how cool your car is -- a flexy muscle car, steroid Jeep, or redwood-capacity pick-up truck -- when a motorcycle pulls up next to you, you know that’s the shit right there. “I need to get a motorcycle someday,” you sigh to yourself. Once you’re up and running in the big-engine world of heavy cars, some of the reasons for why bicycles are the ultimate human-powered rides are also why motorcycles are the ultimate big boy and girl rides. Even those who don’t ride know this. Maybe they’re too anxious to ever try, but they totally would if they weren’t so frightened and the risks weren’t so high and their wife hadn’t forbidden it and blah blah blah. But they know.
And we motorcyclists of course know this much more intimately. We regularly experience all the dimensions rather than just fantasizing about what it must be like.
Even so, most riders don’t fully consciously grasp the full suite of reasons they love it. And they certainly don’t bother theorizing about in what ways motorcycles have evolved to interact and harness our human minds as I do in this book.
Motorcycles may be simple -- a big engine on a heavy bike -- but that simplicity only serves to obfuscate the rich suite of powers and experiences only a motorcycle affords. It’s not a smart phone with a million components and lines of code, but just a fairly short list of old school parts. So, many motorcycle lovers are likely to not suspect there’s such depth to the experience.
But, oh, what motorcycles do -- and what we do with them -- is not simple! And that’s my aim in this book: to flesh out why motorcycles are experientially so… awesome.
MOJOCYCLES
While my aim is to cover the central dimensions of the ride experience, one of the most salient things about motorcycles is simply how cool they appear to onlookers. This is one of the reasons motorcycles are real life Thor’s Hammers as we discussed at the start. If motorcycles were impossible to “lift” but inspired no inclination to even be “lifted,” the analogy wouldn’t have worked. Those who don’t ride want to jump on a motorcycle and get it going not because they have much of a real clue about the experience they’d get, but, rather, because it’s the freakin’ coolest thing they’ve ever seen.
Think about it: motorcycles are so cool they can socially get away with trumpeting their own magnificent arrival! Motorcycles are inherently louder than your average car, but, even so, we often go out of our way to be even louder than we have to, and not just for safety reasons. If we’re pulling up to our favorite haunt -- or, heck, even to the Post Office -- we’re quite likely to give a couple throttle revs. “Hey, I’m here now. Your rides no longer look so cool, amirite?” Make that kind of ostentatious audacious engine rev when pulling up in a minivan and you’ll be laughed at. But no one bats an eye when a motorcycle does it. Muscle cars with manual transmission get away with this too. But a lot of them, especially here in Miami, cost as much as my house. Motorcycles can get away with trumpeting our arrival despite the bike being a tiny fraction of the value of one of those kingly sports cars. Motorcycles are able to self-identify as VIP not because everyone’s wishing they could afford to buy a motorcycle -- they almost certainly can afford a motorcycle -- but because they’re “not worthy.”
We motorcyclists are able to get away with trumpeting our own entrance because, well, why are we able to get away with it?! The answer somehow relates to motorcycles being so cool, but, why exactly? That’s a real mystery. What is it about these particular sorts of bicycles with engines that makes them appear level 11 cool?
To help make the mystery a little more stark, consider motor scooters. Motor scooters are… totally not cool. There are no motor scooter gangs, and, if there somehow were, if given the opportunity to trade them for motorcycles at the monthly gang meeting, the vote would be unanimous: “Trade up for gosh sake!”
So, why are motorcycles so cool, and scooters so not? In short, it’s because motorcycles exude badass strength, but motor scooters exude weakness.
You can hear a motor scooter’s weakness. They have small engines, and so tend to sound whiny. They’re quieter, and usually have quieter mufflers as well. They also tend to have continuously variable transmission engines, and so don’t vary in pitch like a traditional transmission engine you’re familiar with, which makes it sound less like a real creature exerting itself.
Motor scooters accelerate slowly; you never see one peel out at a stop light because they can’t peel out at all. Motorcycles, on the other hand, are in part defined by their ability to out-accelerate all but the most beastly cars.
In fact, motorcycles actually look like beasts. Like a panther, a wolf, or some other creature with sharp teeth and a knack for catching raw meat. Motor scooters, on the other hand, reek of rabbit or deer; they look like motorcycle prey.
Some of this is a consequence of selection pressure over the years -- scooters are designed to be useful in everyday life with less demands on “looking cool,” whereas motorcycles seem to have evolved to look as cool as anything can look to the human mind.
But, some of that look also comes “for free” from the basic body design differences inherent to motor scooters versus motorcycles. Motorcycles not only have a big engine, but it’s placed more forward on the bike making it look more like a strong-chested animal. The engine on a motor scooter, in contrast, is directly over the rear wheel.
This difference also changes the look of the rider: On a motorcycle the rider straddles the engine and ends up in an athletic looking position. But on a motor scooter, because the engine is so far in the back, there’s room for the rider to basically sit as if he or she is having morning tea at the breakfast table.
More generally, motorcycles are cool compared to other vehicles for a variety of reasons such as the following.
● Timeless: they never look dated like most cars do after a few years.
● Naked: Their functionality is out on display rather than hidden under fake skin. They’re beautiful in large part because of this.
● Tough: Onlookers know the rider is no sissy.
● Sparing: The owner of that bike is probably the sort that lives light.
● Living: This person really loves to live.
● No fucks given: The rider doesn’t care about being pegged with motorcycle stereotypes. Comfy in his own skin.
And we’ll find more reasons why they’re cool as we travel through the content of this book, including their finesse (Chapter 2), their power (Chapter 3), and their expressive capability (Chapter 4)
BORED BEGINNER BIKER TO BOOK
So, how did I end up writing a book about motorcycles? I’m a math PhD who has concentrated on understanding design and evolution in biology, brain and culture, with six previous books about my discoveries, and none about motorcycles!
Well I, too, had spent decades passing parked motorcycles, gawking in awe and feeling unworthy. So, when a friend signed up for a motorcycle course and asked if I’d like to join, I jumped at the chance. It had always been something I wanted to do, but while raising kids it had never seemed the right time. My kids were now nearly grown, and I was ready to earn the privilege of lifting Thor’s Hammer and thereby earning an occasional diversion, a romantic ride with my wife at my back, the wind in our hair, going fast. What’s not to like? Motorcycling surely would be fun.
But the course was not fun.
No air conditioning: It was summer and we were required to wear leather jackets, thick jeans, gloves, and a helmet. We trained six hours a day for two days on a sun-baked parking lot, moving so slowly there was never a breeze.
Manual transmission: I have driven manual transmission cars my whole life, but manual for a motorcycle brings unique challenges. First, everything is in the wrong place: the clutch at my left hand squeeze rather than my left foot press, the gear shift at my left foot rather than right hand, the accelerator (throttle) at my right hand rotation rather than right foot press, and the brakes at my right hand and right foot. At every moment I was struggling not to accidentally let up on the clutch and rocket across the lot, up the embankment and onto Interstate 71 into the path of the constant truck traffic. Second, dealing with parking-lot speeds in a manual transmission requires being in the “friction zone” where you must hold the clutch part way in and balance the throttle so as to achieve just the right slow speed for the task at hand. This is something anyone who drives manual transmission cars understands, but because a motorcycle’s engine is so strong relative to the overall weight of the bike, a failure to get just the right balance leads to much exaggerated sputtering and rocking compared to when in a car.
Slow speeds: Parking-lot speed is slow, and a key thing to know about motorcycles is that their magic only emerges once you’re moving beyond parking lot speeds (this is the topic of Chapter 2). With speed the physics changes and the bike lightens, waking from its slumber it becomes stable, coordinated, yet supple and reactive to the barest of touches. Utterly and magically weightless, it flies. But at slow speeds motorcycles are unstable, wonky and ungovernable. At slow speeds motorcycles suck.
Sharp turns without putting a foot down: Every motorcycle course inevitably requires that you practice super tight right angle turns between cones without ever putting a foot down. It’s a cute parlor trick, and riders eventually get good at it, but there’s rarely a need. (Although… living the last couple years in Miami, which floods a lot, I actually do fairly often have to drive very slowly, and sometimes turn, without putting my feet down. The water is so high at times I drive with my feet way up in the air!)
Parking lot: And, needless to say, nothing could be less thrilling than riding in an empty parking lot; practically no optic flow, no obstacles, no city, no country roads, no risks. (And this is kinda the topic of Chapter 3.)
So, there we were in the sweltering heat on our oppressively heavy bikes enjoying only our exposure to the risks of humiliation and injury, all on the promise that later -- much later -- this will totally be a cool thing to do. Because it was assuredly not cool then. If motorcycles were summarized by our experiences during a motorcycle course, there’d be no cult of cool about motorcycles. If books were written about them, they’d be satire. All the cool of motorcycles is bled out into the black top smattered with cheap orange cones. No mojo. It’s a wonder we bothered ourselves to continue riding after that. One in our class of ten dropped out. Wasn’t his thing. Perhaps it was the uncomfortable lameness of the parking lot rides that convinced him.
Luckily I was still motivated to keep on keeping on. With my course under my belt I began riding in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived at the time. I avoided highways at first, and began taking my bike, a 950cc 2019 Yamaha Bolt, a cruiser, to the gym every day. Looking back, I rode poorly and am amazed I never had an accident or even set the bike down. In the first months I remember thinking I was really moving, and then some more experienced rider would buzz by and I’d wonder how that speed -- which I’d now view as unremarkable -- on that road in those conditions was even possible. It didn’t take long to get comfortable; in a few months I found highways less menacing, and began to take them rather than the long way.
After about two years my wife and I moved to Miami, and my experience level -- and joy -- skyrocketed. We quickly realized our cars were a handicap in the heart of the city, and sold them. The motorcycle was enough. And so I rode pretty much every day, all year round. Not only was I getting an explosion of riding time compared to before, but the Miami road habitat is an altogether different animal, filled with impatient cars and swarms of scooters of all kinds. And in Miami we lane split, i.e., ride around and in between lines of cars, whether they’re waiting at a light or moving. No, lane splitting is not legal like it is in California, but -- ahem -- it’s tolerated. Point being, when you’re lane-splitting through Miami traffic an hour or so a day, you get good real quick! At the start, my wife would cry from behind me, “Don’t try going through that gap! Too small! Slow down!” But after a few months, if the gap and timing was even theoretically possible I would get an ear full about why I wasn’t already through it and on our way. I became a whole new level of good. Still not like the riders who grew up on dirt bikes and can do pirouettes while they wheelie, but I had become one with the bike. I had even become one with the bike+wife!
Unlike the excruciatingly bad parking lot experience, actually being an experienced motorcyclist driving fast on real roads amongst real traffic is… awesome! For those non-rider readers, it is difficult to relate to you the full extent to which the motorcycle experience goes way WAY beyond the car experience, but your love of bicycles relative to pedal cars does go some way toward that, as we discussed earlier. But only part way.
And that’s why I wrote this book! To carefully describe what exactly the experience is, and to explain why it “works,” i.e., to explain why we like it. You see, the thing about me is that I’m a cognitive scientist, and one of my weird areas of expertise, such as it is, is on making sense of the human experience. Why we see illusions, why we see in color, why our eyes face forward, why we have emotional expressions. That sort of thing.
And, even weirder, I have focused on how culture creates “machinery” — evolves it — to fit our brains and bodies. These “machines” are sometimes not physical machines at all. They are “software” that harnesses us, like writing, language, music and the arts. For example, I have argued that we can read only because writing culturally evolved to “look like nature,” i.e., to look like the contour conglomerations that are found in natural scenes, thereby harnessing our visual object recognition systems for reading. (See my books, VISION REVOLUTION, HARNESSED, ON THE ORIGIN OF ART, and HUMAN 3.0.)
While that’s an example of cultural “software” that harnesses our brain mechanisms, cultural evolution also creates physical artifacts that harness us, whether it’s more optimally designed clothing, glasses, watches, sports equipment, chairs, video game consoles,....
….and motorcycles.
When a technology finds its hold within human culture, it’s always because it has come to find via cultural selection some sweet spot in the way it plugs in to human brains, bodies, and groups. This book is the story about in what ways motorcycles have culturally evolved to fit us.
In Chapter 2 (SWOOSH) we take up one of the most surprising things about motorcycles, which is that when they get up to speed, they come alive, fly, and carry with them their own gravity. In fact, they’re not so much alive as… they’re you. And, you’re not longer you, but have the powers of a four-legged beast like a wolf.
In Chapter 3 (ZOOM) we discuss what you might most associate with motorcycles, their speed. Although motorcycles wouldn’t be what they are if they weren’t fast, we’ll see that what we like about the speed isn’t per se the speed at all. It’s about the “zoom.”
And in Chapter 4 (VROOM) we discuss the ways in which we communicate through our bikes, emotionally expressing ourselves to the other vehicles in the language of the street. Motorcycles aren’t just wolves among sheep in their physicality, but also in their socio-emotional intelligence.
In total, a motorcycle transforms the rider into a different creature altogether. A minor deity of sorts. After all, only a minor deity is worthy of “lifting” a motorcycle.
Mark Changizi is an author, scientist, and writer. You can find his works at www.changizi.com and his musings here on substack
and on X here Mark Changizi.
MOTORCYCLE MIND invites readers on a captivating journey into the cognitive and emotional experience of riding a motorcycle—a transformation that melds machine and rider into one. Mark Changizi, a cognitive scientist and motorcyclist, explores the profound ways motorcycles harness human instincts, creating an unparalleled sense of freedom, control, and exhilaration.
Through vivid storytelling and rigorous analysis, Changizi unpacks the mysteries of the motorcycle experience, from the physics-defying sensation of counter-steering to the emotional language of throttle and brake. He delves into the unique relationship between rider and bike, likening it to wielding Thor’s Hammer—a powerful, awe-inspiring tool that demands skill and worthiness.
This book isn’t just for riders; it’s for anyone curious about the science of perception, motion, and the evolutionary design that motorcycles tap into. Changizi reveals how motorcycles transform the mundane into the extraordinary, the rider into a street deity, and the open road into a symphony of optic flow and sound.
Whether you’re a seasoned biker or a curious onlooker, MOTORCYCLE MIND will forever change how you view two wheels and the open road.
Currently available at ukiyoto.com and amazon here.
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