Humans Can Only Walk In Circles and We Don't Know Why

lol....that was cool

...ha!! ...could this be a visual interpretation of our learning curve to evolution.
...guess that explains why we keep making the same mistakes. #@*%

I tried this when I was younger , I thought it was just me !

I heard of this before. As it was explained to me we supposedly favor one leg in particular, and that being the case we tend to cover more ground with one leg than the other. When you take this into consideration with say a long trek through an area where it is hard to get a visual bearing (like in a forest where everything pretty much looks the same) you'll repeatedly rely on that favored leg when crossing/scaling/crawling about barriers. In the end all that extra space covered accumulates and you end up walking in circles.

Seems a lot like the Equiangular Spiral, found in much of nature, to me!

Because one leg is more developed than the other so one side is propelled more than the other. When you can see you are able to correct this by pointing yourself in the correct direction.

How can you walk in a perfect line when the earth is round and not perfectly flat anywhere?

I wonder if it also works like toilets: if you're in the Northern hemisphere, do you go clockwise, and go counter-clockwise in the South?

Most men, almost all, have one ball that is bigger than the other. Maybe the big ball makes us list to one side. :-)

Those nazis at npr have done it again! Now I can't walk straight? Thanks a lot! Leftist fascists! /sarcasm

carpenter ants do the same thing when they lose the scent of the ants in front of them. the will walk in a large circle until they die....

My tight punk jeans enable me to waddle in a straight line. :)

One half of your body is from your Dad the other from your Mom. One will be stronger. My right side is stronger (right-handed) so my left brain is stronger. My right side has been tremendously much weaker to diseases though, virus & bacteria. The left side never gets much diseases.

When cancer hit my right chest in 2006 the left side generated extra stem cells and sent them over all at one time to overwhelm the cancer. I was pouring on the nutrition. It stopped the cells from dying but they were just sitting there not healing. But after 4 weeks the stem cell package passed through my chest from the left side over into the weakened right side and I knew I was going to live at that minute.

My right arm being stronger got me drowned once. I was 12YO not good at swimming, so I was swimming along the pool edge, and when I would stop I would reach my left arm up and hold the pool concrete. It worked for a short while but then I swam a longer distance and my right arm pulled me into the middle of the pool in 6 feet depth, way over my head.

After I went down the 3rd time I was gone.

One leg is generally a little longer than the other... Maybe that's a contributing factor.

Very cool. I wonder though, what about blind people? Someone who was born blind. Can they walk in a straight line?

Myth, I totally walk a straight line blindfolded. Stupid post

We should test to see whether or not this is cross-species, then we could determine if it's a physiological or a physical phenomena.

Because the first thing that popped into my head was centrifugal or Coriolis forces, I wonder if they took that into account?

Before reading the article I was going to say "Earth curvature maybe?" lol

(if you walk around a sphere you're walking in a circle technically, right?)

I'm curious if this holds true for "left handed" individuals. Would they be prone to "correct" to the left, and end up circling in that direction ?

I've never tried. I'll have to test it out on my husband. Maybe, not knowing what position we're in, we begin to believe we are no longer going in a straight line and we are drifting, and in an effort to even ourselves out, we walk at a slightly different angle. Then, since we angled ourselves, instead of going straight after we changed direction, we continue in the angle, believing it a straight line, because we haven't gone 90 degrees in any direction. A circle has no sides, or an infinitely small number of straight sides, so we believe we're always going straight if we can't see.

Or maybe its just an evolutionary adaptation for not going too far from the starting point, to be safe. Organisms without eyes might be seen zipping around in circles, waiting for food to happen to be in their way, but the chance of a predator being at the starting point is unlikely, since they were there not too long ago, and they've already circled the small territory over and over again.

Symmetry is a myth. Our minds eye gives the human face and body a symmetry that really does not exist. If you look close, the individual human form is always asymmetrical.

Wouldn't it be stranger if we went straight instead?

1 leg is shorter than the otherone (check your pants for which side has more ragged bottoms). Humans deleloped this evolutionary advantage as we are a social species and straying too far from the group (when done accidentally) will almost always result in death. If you get pissed at the group and storm off, you'll probably be getting tired and think better of it by the time you make the loop.

Enough said. Whos next?

Well obviously the reason we can't keep a straight line while blndfolded is because we weren't blessed with whiskers like cats dogs and other animals.

DARK is to MAN
as
LIGHT-BULB is to BUG

heh.

Weirdness

Hang on, let me get my car....

I love Radio Lab.

I lean to the right dont know why but i do always have.