Category: Motorcycle riding

Author: Andrew Cherney You know why you ride. We all do, right? (Cue violins.) It’s that feeling of release, the rush of adrenaline, the social benefits of a group ride, yadda yadda yadda. We all have known since day one that just a couple of minutes on a bike was a surefire way to relieve any pesky stresses that might crop up in the daily grind. Well, now there's a study out of UCLA, funded by Harley-Davidson, that officially confirms all those messy thoughts and puts it into a bigger, more precise, and scientific context. In short, it seems that riding a scoot gives you some of the same benefits as a workout and decreases cortisol, the nasty hormone that signals stress. The neurobiological study was produced by a team of researchers from UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior who studied a group of healthy experienced riders piloting their own bikes on a predetermined route for 22 miles under normal conditions. The researchers recorded the riders’ brain activity and hormone levels before, during, and after motorcycling, driving a car, and resting. The research team monitored participants’ electrical brain activity and heart rate, as well as levels of adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol using mobile EEG technology. The results found that when riding, the subjects experienced increased sensory focus and resilience to distraction. Riding also produced an increase in adrenaline levels and heart rate, and a decrease in cortisol levels—the kind of results you often get after a light exercise session, which also is a stress reducer. The use of that tech was pretty ground-breaking in itself: “Until recently, the technology to rigorously measure the impact of activities like motorcycling on the brain didn’t exist,” said Dr. Don Vaughn, the neuroscientist who led the research team. “The brain is an amazingly