You have to try this please, it takes 2 seconds.. I could not believe this! It is from an orthopedic surgeon.............. This will confuse your mind and you will keep trying over and over again to see if you can outsmart your foot, but, you can't. It is pre-programmed in your brain!

1. While sitting at your desk in front of your computer, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles...

2. Now, while doing this, draw the number '6' in the air with your right hand Your foot will change direction.

I told you so! And there's nothing you can do about it! You and I both know how stupid it is, but before the day is done you are going to try it again, if you've not already done so.

Send it to your friends to frustrate them too.


As a follow up to this, I once had the clutch rod on my Morgan +4 break during a race. A problem when we still drove our cars to race meetings.

I had driven the car with a broken clutch on a number of occasions quite successfully, but with the pedal operating as if still working. This time the pedal was no the floor, & I could not coordinate my changes & revs. I found a lump of bungy chord which I used to hold the pedal up, & behave as if working.

With my left foot now working as usual I had no trouble changing gears driving home, except for traffic lights. This must prove that it is your left foot that controls your actions, not your brain.

Hasbeen,

Clutchless changes on a crash box, now that takes me back many years!

In fact, in my youth my father insisted that I learn to do it "just in case".

I used to do clutchless changes in the 12/50 Alvis as a matter of course and once for real when a clutch finger (exposed clutch and separate gearbox) fell out of my 14/75 Alvis, no hope of finding it, but fortunately, I'd stopped on a slight slope and was able to start in top gear with a bit of help from the starter.

----

I tried the right foot thing, definitely works!!

Stalled a bit but I forced it. Easier the second time. Yes, I can do it.

Both feet or both hands are easy to change from same to opposite, like a diff. It's doing reverse gear in 4WD front-hand axle that damages your leg clutch..

Dear Hassie,

Thank You. It was fun and it did work.

Hasbeen,

Intuitive stuff like how to ride a bike is 'Systems 1' thinking and largely automatic. You can balance, steer and so on that took some time to learn. Operating the car controls, eg clutch and pedal, practised to Systems 1. When in control of the vehicle, Systems 2.

Riding a bike as in going somewhere requires thinking - deliberate attention, deliberate thinking and choices. That is Systems 2. Anyone who mounts a bike and the brain goes on automatic or say into rumination about the job or spouse's nagging, is likely to end up under a car.

Highly skilled and practised racing drivers can do more things intuitively but the vehicles are going one way and they are in fact highly attentive (Systems 2) to the choices they have to make and of course to the critical, risk, factors. Racing drivers are also 'in the flow', which requires deep concentration and can appear automatic, even to the driver, but it isn't. In fact they are doing far more thinking and exclude all else but the task at hand. 'Flow is a state of effortless concentration that is so deep that you lose sense of time, of yourself, and of the surroundings. You are completely immersed in the task. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pioneer of the flow state, calls it “optimal experience.”'

I would say that the thing that concerns me most when driving is the difficulty of maintaining myself in the present. I do things like checks of rear vision mirrors, mentally talking myself through recognition of road hazards and noting differences in road surfaces and so on. Anything to be more mindful of what I am doing. Enjoying the drive, really experiencing it, helps.