human walking in circles when they strayed

Study: human walking in circles when they strayed

Rely on intuition to determine the direction of Aicod often the goal, but stalling in a closed circuit


A study by scientists Germans that when a person loses the ability to determine the direction in the desert or the darkness of the night walking in circles without the feel that he is wallowing in the same place, and one of the exotic interpretations that one leg longer than the other.

It is the mirror image of what happens in old movies when Aberr people in the jungle or in the desert and find themselves walking in circles. It does not matter how difficult it is trying to walk in a straight line in search of construction, they always end up to the starting point from which they departed. Has now given a team of German scientists first practical guide that people are already walking in circles when you do not have reliable signs of the trends of moving. And examined their study, recently reported in the Journal of modern biology, "Journal Current Biology," tracks the conduct of people who walked for several hours in the Saharan Tunisia and in the forest Pinvald Germany.


Different interpretations

Study did not address the ability of animals, especially camels, select track in the desert, but it seems they are more able than rights and scientists used the Group of perceptual MS and work at the Institute of the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen Germany under the chairmanship of Dr. Jean Suman Dr. Mark Ernst GPS for recording tracks . The results showed that the participants were able only to maintain a straight path when there was the light of the sun or the moon.

However, once blocked the sun behind the clouds, people started walking in circles witnessed little without it. Speaking about the study, said Dr. Suman: "One of the explanations provided in the past to walk in circles is that most people have a leg longer or stronger than the other, resulting in a systematic bias to go in one direction.

The German expert said: "In order to test this interpretation we bring people to walk in the direction of direct and they were blindfolded and then remove any effects of vision.


And walked most of the participants in the study circles, and sometimes in very small circles, a diameter less than 20 meters. "Often end up with the lack of these departments to the systematic trend, as the same person sometimes skewed towards the left and sometimes to the right.


And therefore could not walk in circles due to differences in leg length or strength, but the most likely outcome is the growing doubts about  the straight path that they are on. Suman says this: "There is a small random errors in the sense of the different signals that provide information on the direction of Sir added over time and make the person realize that the straight path deviates from the straight line."


As Dr. Ernst Afeelq part on the results of those tests, saying: "Although people may be convinced that they are walking in a straight line, the perception can not rely on this conviction, always." He adds: "There are more aware of the strategies are indeed necessary to go in a straight line.