How Becoming a Better Dentist Can be like Riding a Bike

This is a video of a man learning to ride a bike. Actually, it is more interesting than that—it is a video of a man learning to ride a special kind of bike, and how he discovered that he had to “unlearn” the conventional method he had mastered as a child before he could fully grasp it. After several months of practicing a few minutes every day, it suddenly “clicked” and he could do it.

This is an interesting demonstration of brain plasticity in action and it shows once again how we really have to work at getting out of our entrenched mental “grooves” in order to discover new pathways of experience. It’s why I always say it’s not enough to get excited about discovering new techniques or methods of diagnosis at a seminar or workshop—you have to put sustained effort into adopting those new methods until they really “click” and become second nature.

To further illustrate that point, you’ll notice how even though the experimenter in this video eventually “forgot” how to ride a normal bike during this process, it only took a few minutes of practice for it all to come back and for his brain to fall into the old grooves.

This is something that every dentist—or anyone interested in personal progress for that matter—should be aware of. Our brains can be very adept at storing learned behaviors to create “muscle memory” and that is a wonderful and useful thing; it’s what expertise is all about, really—getting so good at something that you don’t have to consciously think about it anymore. But that also means you have some work to do if you want to enter new areas of expertise. You have to fight to get out of the grooves.