There is such a story that a person lost in the forest will walk in circles and will definitely come to the place where he has already been. This is often played out in the movies and is explained at the everyday level by the fact that the left arm and leg are slightly shorter. The step taken by the left foot will be slightly smaller. This slight difference is the reason for the roll to the left while driving.
Despite the fact that such worldly wisdom has been known to people for a long time, only recently it received scientific confirmation, according to the authors of the study, who published an article in the journal Current Biology.
But the reason is not at all the difference in steps …
“Lost people really cannot walk in a straight line without some reference point in space - a high tower, a mountain, a solar or lunar disk in the sky. In such a situation, they actually walk in circles,”said lead author Jan Souman, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany, quoted by Cell Press.
According to scientists, this closed path of the path does not look like regular circles - wandering in an unfamiliar place, people can strongly take to the left, then again go to the right. This circumstance allowed the authors of the article to conclude that it is the gradual "drift" of a person's ideas about where the final point of his movement is, and not the natural tendency to walk to the left or right, or the difference in strength or length of legs that leads to movement in a circle.
Scientists came to such conclusions as a result of experiments with volunteers who were instructed to move through a dense and even forest or desert, adhering to the most straightforward path. At the same time, the trajectory of the volunteers was recorded using a GPS navigator, and the experiment itself lasted for 6 hours.
Scientists have found that people who moved through the forest in cloudy weather certainly deviated from the straight path, several times passing the already traveled path and not noticing it. On the contrary, in sunny weather, the volunteers walked almost in a straight line, guided by the position of the sun.
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In a similar experiment conducted in the Sahara Desert, volunteers who traveled during the day did not walk in circles, but they nevertheless deviated noticeably from a straight path. At the same time, the only volunteer who agreed to a night trip in the desert also began to walk in a circle as soon as the Moon left the sky.
The blind volunteers who also took part in the experiment, surprisingly scientists walked in very small circles.
Scientists believe that such walking in circles occurs due to the accumulating "noise" in the human sensorimotor system. If a person does not have at least one landmark that indicates the direction of movement, this "noise" - random landmarks or inferences about their own location - knock the "calibration" of the sensorimotor system, deflecting the person to the side from the straight course.
For their experiments, the scientists plan to use the most modern equipment that provides the effect of virtual reality, including a treadmill recently created at their institute, which allows a person to move in any direction (you can see the track here). Participants in future experiments will try to move through the virtual forest without leaving the laboratory. This will allow you to control all the information available to the participants, as well as the movements of the participant himself.