The Backwards Brain Tractor - Smarter Every Day 305

[Tractor engine running] Good news! I fixed the tractor. Except, watch this. [Destin laughing hysterically] Hilarious. It's like the backwards brain bicycle only a tractor. Oh, man. Oh, golly. The steering cylinder was out. Actually, I've been amazed at how quickly my brain has adapted because of the bicycle. Seriously. I can do it. It's really, kinda fun. The steering cylinder had a leak, and I got it repaired. I'll show you what I did. Put it in neutral. It's pretty easy mistake. These are swapped. I got to fix that. Being a country boy is awesome. Oh, that's reversed. My bad. Okay, I have a little announcement here I'm going to make. But first, if you're not familiar with the concept of the backwards brain bicycle, that's it. And years ago, I made this video. It's pretty cool because it's got this set of gears on top. And when you turn the handlebars one way, the wheel will go the opposite direction. So the thing about this is it's very, very hard to ride. Your brain has a hard time getting over your own brain, and it's fascinating. Had I realized at the time that I made that video that so many people all over the world would be able to relate to that video and understand cognitive bias in a new way because of this metaphor, I would have changed the video just a little bit. For example, there's one moment in the video where I say it took me eight months to learn how to ride this bike. In two weeks, he did something that took me eight months to do. I would just get on the bike, up at the driveway, up and back every so often. But yeah, that took about eight months, but I wasn't locked in. And what I found over the years that I've had friends that have come up to this thing and they've locked in. They're like, give me the bike. I'm angry because I can't ride it. I'm going to focus and I'm going to learn how to do it. And they are able to do it in a few days. And that's fascinating to me. There's something about the quality of the dedication you have to the learning of the thing that affects your ability to do it, I think that's fascinating. Years ago, I wanted to test this. So I mailed one to Mike Boyd and challenged him to learn it by locking in and seeing what he could do. He learned it in an hour, which is absolutely remarkable. Now, Mike is not normal. He has the ability to learn very complicated things quickly, and he has some other skills that probably helped him along the way. But at the end of this video, I'll tell you about a common thread between people who can do this instantly or in minutes, at least. There's been a lot of academic articles written using this as a metaphor, and there's something there, because I'm not a neuroscientist or anything, there's something about how focused you are on the learning that affects your ability to do something like this. Now, there's also something like when I got on the tractor, the backwards tractor, that thing, I instantly could do it. I didn't have to learn anything. I already had that neural pathway in my head. In fact, somebody asked me last night, Can you still ride that bicycle? And the answer is yes. In fact, I have this really cool bicycle, and you can just ride it in normal bicycle mode, or you can pull this pin and change it to backwards brain bicycle mode, and I can ride it in both modes. What's interesting is when I hop on this bike, I'm wobbly for a foot or so, and then my brain will pick which algorithm I'm supposed to be using, and I can just do it. It's fascinating, which tells me that once you learn this, you keep it. Now, some people that I know, they've tried to learn this stuff, and they didn't stick with it very much, so it's harder for them to keep the skill, but it seems to be something that persist once you build that pathway in your brain. Big thank you to Jonathan, Manon, and Mike, who reached out and offered to help many years ago, so they engineered and built this interchangeable bicycle. Thank you so much, guys. I appreciate it. Okay, it's time for the announcement. Every year here on Smarter Every Day, I create what's called the Smarter Every Day Sticker Team, and it's my way of saying thank you to the patrons of Smarter Every Day. That support at Patreon. com/smartereveryday. I thank people for sticking with me. They're stickers. You get it? It's a dad joke. Anyway, So it's also my way of trying to create artificial scarcity. So basically, if you jump on the sticker team, you're a part of that year's sticker team. For example, the first year, we were the supersonic baseball sticker team. After that, we were the JWST space team. We've done the Exploration team. This year, we have three stickers because we figured out during the space team years that people like the little stickers, too. People have sent me photos of them sticking these stickers all over things.

For example, this year's first small sticker, there's three stickers, sticker is good for playing pranks on people. For example, let's say your son were to buy a water bottle and it were to come in the mail and you were to intercept it before he got it. So the first sticker is a cicada. Now, we had a cicada thing happen this year in the US. And so this looks like a cicada with a white border. That doesn't look real, does it? But what you realize is this is actually a transparent sticker, and it actually looks like a cicada. So when you put it on something, it makes you do a double take. You're like, Wait, what is that? It looks really cool. So when you put this thing on a wall somewhere, it looks like some random thing is stuck there and it confuses people. And I have had way more fun with these stickers than I care to admit. They're really, really cool. So that's the first sticker. The second sticker, you may recall during the Eclipse this year, I worked really hard to take this really cool film photo on one piece of film. Now, I tried to get that sticker on... image on a sticker. It didn't quite work out, so we made a graphic representation of it. This form factor is pretty cool. This long sticker ends up working really well on a laptop or maybe on a lunch box or something like that. But I really enjoy seeing where people put their stickers. People have sent in photos over the years of where they put their stuff, and I'm excited to see where people end up putting this sticker. The big sticker this year, the name of the team, this year we're calling it the Smarter Every Day Discovery Team, and it's just a hodgepodge of all the stuff we've studied this year on Smarter Every Day. We've got the cicadas, we launched a rocket, we've got the eclipse. It's a really cool sticker to commemorate what we've done this year together. I would love it if you would consider supporting Smarter Every Day on Patreon at Patreon. com/smartereveryday. It's a really big deal because when you support... I'm trying to pick up a cicada. Because when you support Smarter Every Day on Patreon, that frees me from the pressures of the algorithm, allows me to take the time to make videos about things I really, really like. So there's a few videos I did this year that I knew weren't going to perform well in the algorithm, but they were very important to me. And I think authenticity is key. And I want to continue to make intelligent, respectful content. And I'm grateful to everybody that supports on Patreon because you really allow me to do that. So everybody that's supporting by the end of the year, I'm physically going to mail you these stickers to your house and you'll get to do whatever you want with them. You got to stick them somewhere because you can't just put a sticker in a drawer. It needs to be stuck. That's what stickers want to do. So anyway, thank you so much, everybody that supports on Patreon, Patreon. com/smartereveryday. I think a good way to end this video is to drive some more backwards things, in this case, the backwards tractor. Here we go! Put it in gear. Go forward, turn the wheel to the left. The tractor goes to the right [Destin laughing] Oh, man. Oh. Is that good? That's hilarious. I got to go switch those hoses now, but for the time being, it's very funny. So good. I thought you'd enjoy that. I'm Destin, you're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one, hah! Okay, I came out here to shoot the thumbnail for the video, and it was out of steering fluid, even though I swapped the connectors. So clearly, I have a hard time getting this tractor running. But a couple of things I wanted to say. While preparing this video, I realized that there are a lot of people that have made videos about the Backwards Brain bicycle. There's one guy on YouTube, his name is Laser Saber. He made a video about being able to ride it almost immediately. And also Carl, who did the remote control helicopter stuff for us during the helicopter series way back in the day, he could do it very quickly. People that seem to be able to ride the bike immediately all have one thing in common. They're drone pilots. They seem to be able to do this way quicker than most people. I think that has something to do with the fact that they invert things in their head. They can fly things inverted. I thought that was really cool. I just wanted to note that. Turns out power steering systems like fluid. That's good. Also, that nut is loose there.