Disoriented people go in circles Bashny.Net

People trying to pass directly through the unfamiliar territory and do not have a guide, be sure to go astray, and will walk in circles, - confirm a certain wisdom of German psychologists.

"The stories of travelers who are lost in the woods or desert, and passing, as they seemed to be dozens of kilometers ahead, returned to their same tracks, of course, true," - says Jan Souman (researcher from the Institute for Biological Cybernetics Max Planck in Germany) . "A man without a visible landmark (towers, mountains, sun, moon) can not go in a straight line, it always will roll out of the way and go in a circle».




The researchers selected volunteers provided them with all the necessary and started wandering through the dense forest and vast wilderness.

According to the instructions, study participants had to go right, anywhere, as far as possible, without turning, experts followed their movements using GPS.

Four walkers, walking in the woods on a cloudy day, quickly huddled together and began circling among European birches and pines, moreover, the three did not notice that a few times ran into their same tracks.
The other two that fell on the night forest walk, all the time kept more or less the correct trajectory, except for the first 15 minutes, when daylight, the clouds closed, not yet disappeared from the horizon.

In the desert with three volunteers went to psychologists.

Two of the participants struggled with the desert in the afternoon, in the heat, they strayed from the path, and, interestingly, their should not be returned.
The third, to travel at night, in a straight path led moon, but when she was gone, Walker made a few bad turns and back to the starting point.

Researchers conducted other tests: test tied eyes and watching their movements. Blind necessarily describe a circle of very small diameter (up to 20 meters).

Why do people go in circles? Some people believe that we are moving in a circle due to the difference in the legs: left, tend to be stronger, and therefore we will always mow in the same direction. German scientists have found - a circular motion has no taxonomy, one can randomly turn off to the left and right, but I still go back to the beginning of the path

. Souman itself (study leader) believed that the reason for this strange behavior lies in the noise accumulates in the human sensorimotor system. Without visual cues, signals, and third-party personal impressions about the "correct" way of knock our natural compass, as a result of a person, that not knowing, deviates from the true course.

The plans from the experts to test this theory on the computer - the subjects will be traveling in virtual reality on geographical locations, and to go on a special treadmill in the study scientists. Experimenters will read the information that comes into the mind of walkers. Her thorough analysis, as the scientists hope will help explain this phenomenon.