«
»

No, No, Don’t Look! Target Fixation

Burros and motorcycles

I was out riding with my OFMC buddies John and Bill one time and we were coming down from some pass, I don’t remember which one. It was one of those roads where there’s a steep hillside rising on one side and that same steep hillside continues down on your other side. The perfect place for rocks to fall onto the road.

So we’re cruising along and, well what a coincidence, there was a big rock on the road ahead of me. About the size of softball as I judged it. Don’t want to hit that sucker!

Of course I did. I ran right over it, with the front end of the bike getting thrown way up in the air. The only wheelie I’ve ever done on my CB750.

That was target fixation at work. It wasn’t until sometime later that I ever learned about target fixation, but when I did I knew that was exactly what had led me to hit that rock.

In simple terms, target fixation means wherever you’re looking, that’s where you’ll go. And it’s real. See a big pothole and want to avoid it? Don’t look at it. Look at the level surface to the right or left and you’ll go there, missing the pothole. Look at the pothole and you’d better brace for the impact.

I had a number of similar experiences over the years, until I learned all this myself. Now I’ll sometimes practice picking a spot and then looking elsewhere. It can be hard, like when someone tells you not to think about pink elephants. And if there’s some crash staring you in the face it can be really hard not to look at that danger. But you’ve got to look elsewhere. Otherwise you’re going to learn an unpleasant lesson in what target fixation is all about.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Daytona Bike Week photos and final wrap-up

Biker Quote for Today

Cow skin saves your skin. Let’s hear it for cow skin.

Tags:

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Motorcycle Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “No, No, Don’t Look! Target Fixation”

  1. dom Says:
    March 18th, 2011 at 8:59 am

    Please delete prior posting, had too much in my clipboard…..

    Yep, classic case of “Target Fixation”, it’s incredibly hard to look away from the danger and focus instead on your path around it.

    Then again, fixation can help. While doing a tight u-turn, fixating on where you want to go instead of that approaching cliff side, really helps. Of course, if you fixate on the cliff-side….not so good.

    dom

Leave a Reply