Show profile
Link to this post
Subject: Why we walk in circles
This is fascinating stuff: researchers have worked out that people will, if they haven't any visual references, start walking in circles in 100m or less. Now, I know people have a tendency to walk in circles, every movie featuring people lost in the bush has a comment about passing the same thing two or twenty times, but 100 metres? Wow.
From ScienceNews via boingboing.
Circular walking occurs when people have to rely solely on bodily cues, such as rotational shifts and joint movements, to estimate the location of “straight ahead,” (researcher Jan) Souman hypothesizes. As random errors in bodily feedback accumulate, a person eventually drifts to one side or the other. A walker dependent on bodily cues may first make a circle to the right, drift back to a straight-ahead direction, start to zigzag and then make a circle to the left.
From ScienceNews via boingboing.
BLEARGH
