The human goes into a circle when there is no directional object

When falling into unfamiliar areas and there is nothing to guide the direction, even if people try to go straight, the journey eventually turns out to be a circle. That is the content of a report posted online on August 20 in Current Biology. This view is widely accepted. However, according to the researchers, there is no scientific evidence to support this.

Jan Souman from Germany's Max Planck Institute of Student Control said: 'It's true that people who get lost in vicious circles are real. When nothing is oriented forward like a tower or a mountain or moon, the sun, people cannot go in a straight direction. '

There are no rules in the vicious circles that we unconsciously come in, the researchers said. A person may turn left and turn right before returning to the exact place where they started. This fact rejects the idea that humans go into a circle because the body has a bias toward one direction; for example, positive and negative legs, or differences in the length of the legs. Souman said that going around appeared randomly even though people thought they needed to go straight ahead.

Testing was conducted in two forest and desert environments. Participants are asked to go as straight as possible in a certain direction. Their itinerary is recorded through GPS global positioning system. Six people walked in a thin forest, wide for several hours - four people on a cloudy day, without the sun. As a result, all four of them went in circles, in which three people kept returning to places that had passed without knowing it. When the sun comes out of the clouds, the other two mostly go straight in perfect direction, not counting the first 15 minutes when the sun is clouded.

When falling into unfamiliar areas and there is nothing to guide the direction, even if people try to go straight, the journey eventually turns out to be a circle. (Photo: iStockphoto / David Ciemny)

Three other people participated in the experiment for several hours in the Sahara desert in Southern Tunisia. Two of them deviate from the required direction but are not going round. The third person goes at night, under the full moon. Only when the moon disappeared after the clouds, did this person deviate far from the direction he was going, back to the area that had started.

In another trial, participants blindfolded the participants. The results are surprising, these people go into very small circles and not in a certain direction. From this result, the researchers learned that the cause is due to the 'noise noise' accumulated in the body's sensory system . If there is no external factor to guide the direction, affect the body's senses in the straight forward direction, this 'noise' can make people go round.

Souman's team intends to study this trend under controlled conditions. For example, they created a virtual-reality forest so that participants could follow any direction they chose. These tests allow researchers to eliminate influencing factors such as the sun, milestones . and explore the role of these factors in whether participants go straight or go around.

The study involved Jan L. Souman, Manish N. Sreenivasa, Marc O. Ernst, and Ilja Frissen from the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.