Why is all this important? Primarily, it is the reason I started this blog in the first place and that is to begin a journey to understand how my brain works.

A short time ago, a friend of mine who rides a bike, told me that she enjoys riding but only when she has a destination. The only exception was on Sunday when she seemed to be able to just ride around aimlessly and enjoy the surroundings. This interested me because when she articulated this, I realized that I felt the same way about my scooter. Rides with no destination during the week were not as enjoyable as rides where I was going somewhere specific. On Sunday, or on statutory holidays, I could ride without any more destination in mind than to head north out of the city.  I had thought the no destination thing was just me until my friend shared her thoughts and now I wonder if this is more general.  I also wonder what it is about my brain and my friend’s, that the a destination makes a big difference in terms of the enjoyment of a ride.

What do you think?

Are you a bike rider, either powered or not, and can you just go for a ride without worrying about where you are going?  I would love to get feedback from you in the comments section if you have a moment.

My memories of the time were of being frightened all the time but that is somewhat untrue. When I was actually running the course I was fine. It was only after, or before, when I thought about it that I was fearful. What I neglected to remember was that when on the course I probably did better than the rest of my troop.

Quite a few years late I was still convinced that I was a coward, and I had lots of help from the military in coming to that conclusion. One day on a driving vacation I, left the car and was walking down a path at an Amythist mine in Northern Ontario along with an animal control officer that I had run into in the parking lot. As we walked, he allowed that he was there to check out a potentially rabid dog owned by the people who looked after the property. There was no-one else there as the mine was closed and, although it was normally open to tourists, it was end of season and it was closed As he was telling me about the dog on the property that had attacked a tourist, suddenly the dog, a huge German Shepherd, appeared and came running down the path towards us. The animal control officer stepped in front of me raising his metal clipboard, and shouted at me to get behind him. I didn’t need to be asked twice.

What unfolded in the next few minutes turned out to be an important insight into how my brain worked in an emergency leading to the subsequent conclusion that I was anything but a coward. Or perhaps more accurately I was only a coward when I was thinking about something scary. When it actually happened I was fine–more than fine. The dog charged us and the officer hit it on the snout with the metal clipboard and then hit it again before the dog backed off. We continued on down the road because the officer wanted to check with the dog’s owners but it was soon apparent they were not home and the dog was now getting louder and more threatening. The officer told me to pick up a handful of gravel and if the dog got around him, to throw them in the dog’s face. I did as I was told and then once again the dog charged. This time there was no barking and growling. The dog ran straight at us and the officer threw the gravel into its face. It whimpered and ran back to the house. We then walked backwards, as per the officer’s instructions back down the road all the way to the parking lot and then went our separate ways. It wasn’t until half an hour later when I had driven to a tourist information office and stopped to make a phone call at the pay phone and reached out to dial that I realized I was shaking. During the whole time in the confrontation with the dog my mind seemed to be running in slow motion assessing the situation, going over my option. I seemed perfectly calm. That’s what happens to my mind in an emergency.

I have heard people say that ADHD brains run faster. They seem to but I have also heard from more reputable sources that they actually run slower and it seems faster as a result. It’s a bit like film or video. If you want to the image to move slower, in slow motion if you will, you don’t lower the number of frames per second, you actually increase it.

At first I thought that because of the way my brain behaved, I was brave and sometimes when I watch movies on television and the protagonists get into trouble and fall apart in the situation, I feel angry and critical. But I am not really brave and I have no right to judge how others react to danger because, in my case I know that it’s all about brain chemistry and how my brain reacts to emergencies. It is not a conscious decision. I know that heroes will say that it’s not about whether they were afraid or not. They were afraid and they took the appropriate action anyway.

According to the study’s lead researcher Dr. Nuno Sousa in an article in Science magazine, “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be a better approach.”

Take heart though, even though your brain may have rewired itself for the worse, it still has the potential to unlearn these habits and learn new more advantageous ones.

Dr. Sousa said, “The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ. Dendrites and synapses retract and reform and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”