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2.8 Crossing hands on the handlebar:

It's often thought that when the hands are put on the handlebars, the human brain rapidly controls the arms to act on the handlebar in order to insure stability and steering of a 2-Wheeler.

A simple test can show that it's not true: While riding at slow speed and being very careful, both hands can be crossed right-left on the handlebar. Steering immediately becomes acrobatic and almost impossible. So you have to be very careful when checking this phenomenon because the 2-Wheeler can fall abruptly and you can get hurt. At high speeds, the gyroscopic reactions and counter-reactions help the 2-Wheeler stay up better, but steering still is very difficult.

Obviously, the brain hardly adapts to this simple inversion, even if you practise a lot. So the brain hardly holds up the 2-Wheeler all by itself. The explanation of this erratic behavior can be found at stand still: If the torso leans to the right, for instance, the front wheel is also oriented to the right which is the opposite of the normal Torso-Arms-Handlebar mechanism. So when the 2-Wheeler falls, the front wheel is not oriented to bring it back up, it's rather oriented to make it fall even faster. In servomechanism terms, it's obvious that the error detector gives an inverted signal, which fools the mechanism.

A possible adaptation for the brain would be for it to associate a torso rotation to the right (instead of normally to the left) when leaning to the right, in order to push on the right handle of the handlebar. This would then simulate a modified Torso-Arms-Handlebar mechanism.

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