The Man Who Walked Backward | Hacker News Reader

The Man Who Walked Backward

texasmonthly.com

32 pointsprostoalex9 comments

I was surprised to see that the article ended without revealing whether he made it, but apparently it's an excerpt from a much longer biography.

Wikipedia sort of answers that question but leaves open a ton of other questions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plennie_L._Wingo

Apparently Wingo published a memoir in 1982 under the title Around the world Backwards, and the new biography is called The Man Who Walked Backward: An American Dreamer's Search for Meaning in the Great Depression.

I can't believe how many words are written about everything except his journey. I kept skimming and skimming but there's so much fluff

I couldn’t agree more. Maybe we all just got Rick Rolled in long form.

Looks like he made it 8000 miles in 6 months before Istanbul denied him a visa. Came home to find that his wife had divorced him in absentia.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1018707656

You just summed up what I basically wanted to know. Thanks.

When my son had just gotten to the point he could confidently walk, we watched as he went from the living room, around a corner, down the hall and around a corner into his room - backwards the whole way. He didn't turn his head or walk slow. We'd never seen him walk backwards before.

From the Wikipedia article:

> He wears periscopic eyeglasses, fastened over his ears like regular spectacles, which enables him to see where he is walking.

OK, that makes sense.

I wonder if he could walk normally (forward) again after his backward trip.

Perhaps this is related: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable...

And perhaps this Smarter-Every-Day video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0

He started as an adult, so I doubt that there were permanent effects. It does remind me of those experiments with kittens, where researchers mounted prisms over their eyes, and then studied their optic pathways, using intracranial electrodes and so on. In those cases, brain development basically reversed whatever distortion the prisms caused.

But damn, teaching a kid to ride that backwards bike is sick.

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