Report: Without A Reference Point, We Walk In Circles

Do you feel like you’re walking in circles when lost? If so, you actually might be walking in circles. Fascinating new research from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany found that without a reference point, we just can’t walk in a straight line!

Max Planck Institute researchers Jan Souman and Marc Ernst examined the walking trajectories (via GPS) of study participants who walked for several hours in the Sahara desert in Tunisia and in the Bienwald forest area in Germany.

Souman and Ernst found that participants were only able to walk in a straight path when the sun or moon were visible. However, as soon as the sun or moon disappeared behind clouds, participants started walking in circles without even knowing it! Check out the participant’s trajectories below:

So why do we tend to walk in circles without a reference cue? Nobody knows! The researchers do have some theories though:

Dr. Jan Souman said: “One explanation offered in the past for walking in circles is that most people have one leg longer or stronger than the other, which would produce a systematic bias in one direction. To test this explanation, we instructed people to walk straight while blindfolded, thus removing the effects of vision. Most of the participants in the study walked in circles, sometimes in extremely small ones (diameter less than 20 m).

However, it turned out that these circles were rarely in a systematic direction. Instead, the same person sometimes veered to the left, sometimes to the right. Walking in circles is therefore not caused by differences in leg length or strength, but more likely the result of increasing uncertainty about where straight ahead is. “Small random errors in the various sensory signals that provide information about walking direction add up over time, making what a person perceives to be straight ahead drift away from the true straight ahead direction,” according to Souman.

So the next time you’re lost and convinced you’re making progress, you might want to rethink the extent to which you should trust yourself.

“The results from these experiments show that even though people may be convinced that they are walking in a straight line, their perception is not always reliable. Additional, more cognitive, strategies are necessary to really walk in a straight line. People need to use reliable cues for walking direction in their environment, for example a tower or mountain in the distance, or the position of the sun,” Ernst says.

Have you ever found yourself walking in circles?

Article image via urearthlodge.