Black Sabbath.

By George Denison

Cycling through the five boroughs is like being followed around by an amazing orchestra with a huge horn section. The noise from some intersections could knock you down. But a weekday breeze through the park can give you the closest thing to silence in this city. After riding a while, you’d be surprised how many times you find yourself stopping to ask drivers, “Who sings that?” It worked once maybe. So while searching for your air pump this spring, throw these songs on your smartphone for the ride.

War Pigs - Black Sabbath (Paranoid)

A regular first song of my morning commute. The intro makes the groggy first turn a little more tolerable. Then it picks up just as you make it through and guides your body to your groove and adrenaline to your veins. Try not to thrash too hard in traffic though.

Still D.R.E. – Dr. Dre (The Chronic 2001)

Sun is out. And you’re back! Chances are if you’ve been off the saddle all winter, you need some encouragement on that halfway there hill. Let them know you still got it, try to reach a 93.4 rpm cadence sync’d to the beat in Dre’s comeback middle finger. You might want to stretch first. Of course, you’d better turn this up if you’re hittin’ corners in a recumbent.

Cocoo Butter – Action Bronson ft. Nina Simone (Well-Done)

Last year, the Queens born rapper/chef dropped this collaboration with Statik Selektah, and I haven’t been able to put it down since. This whole album is the freshest soundtrack you can find for moving through the city. Whether cruising through your hood or digging in on the bridge, you’re covered. Best line: “Ill prosciutto. Legend, Phil Rizzuto.”

Bicycle Race – Queen (Jazz)

This cliche will not be avoided. A sweeping chord progression. A chanted anthem. If you don’t want to ride your bicycle after hearing this, you have no soul. But it’s best that this remain warm-up music that you and your concerned roommate don’t talk about. That being said, it’s also recommended for you to concede the road to anyone that rides up blasting this song. They could be dangerously happy or a fat bottomed girl. Either way I think it’s a good idea to let them get ahead.

The Motto – Drake (Take Care)

This one is for your own good. Those fleeting moments you ride doubles with a cool cab driver can leave you with a verse severely stuck in your head. Chances are, right now you’re riding through clouds of “The Motto.” Take the proper precautions, finish the song, and repeat it. YOLO!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t discourage the use of headphones while cycling. Phones have speakers and clothes have pockets. They were made for exactly this. See you in the bike lane!

What happens upstairs to make the wheels go round?

By Bob Nelson, P.T.

If you read any of the thousands books and articles about cycling technique, what you read about is body position, biomechanical efficiency, aerodynamic resistance and muscle activation, among other imponderables.  Nobody talks about how the brain controls movement.  But the brain is where movement gets started, and there’s plenty to learn about cycling if you just think about the brain.

Neurologists are the folks who think about the brain, and the field of neurology has been abuzz with news of a Dutch man in his late 50s who checked in to a clinic for Parkinson’s disease in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.  Parkinson’s is one of several movement disorders directly traceable to the brain, and patients typically have trouble initiating movement.  A common symptom is freezing in place, at inopportune moments like crossing a busy city street.  Patients also display what’s called postural instability, meaning they fall easily. They also have tremors in the arms and legs and sometimes the face.

This Dutch man had severe Parkinson’s and was unable to take more than a few steps without falling over.  The case was reported in 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine, which has a video on its website (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm0810287) that shows both his heartbreaking physical condition walking down a hospital corridor – and his amazing ability to ride a bicycle with no trace whatever of a movement disorder.

Neurologists, not least among them at the Dutch clinic, have been stunned at this news.  How could a man with advanced degenerative brain disease be able to ride a bicycle, which does, after all, require balance and some degree of motor coordination?

Bastiaan Bloem, the Dutch neurologist who wrote up the case for NEJM, asked 20 more of his Parkinson’s patients to ride bicycles, and every one of them could.  (Remember, this is the Netherlands, where everyone, but everyone, rides a bike.)  He suggests that the rotary motion of the pedals may provide an external pacing cue that keeps the Parkinson’s patients on track.  Or, he writes, maybe bicycling doesn’t require very much input from the part of the brain that’s diseased in Parkinson’s patients.

There’s a famous cartoon of Homer Simpson’s brain that shows major partitions for sleep, doughnuts, sex and beer.  It’s tough to argue with this insight, but brain anatomists divvy the gray matter up into regions for consciousness, movement, sensation and emotion.  Movement circuits start in a slice across the midbrain called the motor cortex.  Those motor neurons take several detours before they reach the spinal cord and the neurons, or nerve cells, that will carry the brain’s movement orders to the muscles.  (Homer’s brain is the same, but smaller.)

One of the brain organs that our brains and Homer’s share is called the basal ganglia.  They look like two lumps with ram’s horns on the underside (“basal” side) of the brain.  The brain’s orders to move go through the basal ganglia, which are essentially signal processing units that help figure out motor strategies.  Given a voice, the basal ganglia would say:  So you’re going to ride a bike?  Better know where to put your foot!  And then what are you going to do?

In patients with Parkinson’s, it’s precisely this region, the basal ganglia, that is impaired, and it’s the reason why Parkinson’s patients freeze, because the part of the brain that tells them what to do next isn’t functioning.  It’s certainly possible that one of the reasons the Dutch patient wasn’t showing any sign of Parkinson’s while riding a bike is that riding a bike doesn’t require a lot of signal processing in the basal ganglia.  Nurses helped the patient onto the bike and got him going, and once he was going, he could keep doing the same thing without much thought about motor strategies.

It’s thought that different kinds of guidance use different parts of the brain.  For example, if you’re learning to ride a bike without anyone’s help, you have to figure things out on your own, which requires a lot of conscious attention to the task.  That uses the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.  If you’ve got someone telling you where to put your foot and what to do next, you don’t need much conscious effect, but you do need balance and coordination, which reside mostly in the cerebellum, a lobe at the back of the brain.  And if you’ve got things figured out but you’re playing with muscle activation (push with the foot?  lift the toes?  flex then extend the hip?), you’re refining a motor strategy, and the basal ganglia are doing it.

Australian researchers in 2005 did electromyographic studies of novice and experienced cyclists, in which they stuck electrodes into thigh muscles to determine which muscles were getting the most juice and therefore which were being used and how often.  Experienced cyclists had less variability in muscle recruitment than novices, presumably the result of their long practice.  Working on bicycling – practicing on different bikes, riding on varied terrain, thinking of different ways of pulling up on the pedals and pushing down – creates new nerve connections and reinforces old ones among the different parts of the brain and with the spinal cord and with muscles.  Scientists think that those connections, once made, persist, which is why you never forget how to ride a bike.

Bob Nelson is a physical therapist at H&D Physical Therapy (http://www.hdphysicaltherapy.com/) and founded the LGBT bicycle club Fast and Fabulous (http://fastnfab.org/).  He’ll be delivering a presentation on this topic at Bike Expo New York at Basketball City on the East River on May 3, 4 and 5.  (http://www.bikenewyork.org/bike-expo-new-york/expo-programing/).

For the first time in years, there will be three cyclist shows in four weeks. It’s all happening during Bike Month NYC (May), and the shows will celebrate all types of bikes, all kinds of riders, and the activity that brings them together.

Bike Month NYC will kick off with the New Amsterdam Bike Show, set to serenade New Yorkers with two days of bikes galore on April 28 and 29. The event, which is being organized by Manhattan Media, aims to establish New York as North America’s premiere Cycling Capitol. With sponsorship straight from the “Mecca” (KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, who fly out of Amsterdam, widely regarded as the “Biking Capitol of the World”) and an eye for a wide range of consumer tastes in bikes, The New Amsterdam Bike Show looks to lead the way for cyclists this spring.

But Manhattan Media’s darling child isn’t the only pony in this show. It’s all about the bikes, and for that reason, cycling fans should rejoice at the fact that the festivities will continue when TD Bank’s Five Borough Bike Tour’s “Bike Expo” returns – this time with 80 booths and scores of additional activities. The Bike Expo hopes to bring “cycling to the center stage” on May 3 through 5, the days preceding the TD Bank Five Borough Bike Tour.

And while the grueling Five Borough circuit will claim the day for thousands of New Yorkers on May 6, there will still be more to do in the big bad city for those who just can’t get enough of the cycle-centric craze. And so, New Yorkers get one last reprieve in the form of the Gran Fondo Bike Expo – a homage to the road cycling and Italian-style bike racing, which will run on May 18 and 19 out of Penn Plaza Pavilion.

So if you haven’t already, switch gears! Forget running sneakers and costly cars. Just locate your old bike – or better yet, buy a new one! It’s time to ride, and it’s time to join the rest of the city in a month of cycling-centered initiatives.

After all, cyclists are more than the individuals who pedal: they are a community, as vibrant and vital to the city’s character as any activity. And this year, the New York cycling community is putting the rest of us on notice. This year, the city that never sleeps is becoming the city whose wheels never stop spinning.