Why We Walk in Circles

I remember in the beginning of the second installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Two Towers), Frodo and Sam are in Mordor walking in circles on their way to Mount Doom. Remember?

"This looks familiar."

"We've been here before, we're walking in circles."

I thought, how can you be walking in circles when you are supposed to be headed toward the giant volcano in the distance?

This article in Science Magazine doesn't explain it, but it's a good an intro as any today.

Interesting stuff. People tend to walk in circles on cloudy days when dropped in the middle of nowhere, while the tendency is to walk in more straight paths on sunny days.

And someone actually got funded to check it out!

The idea for the study came from a German science television show called Kopfball (literally, "head ball," as in soccer), which tries to answer viewers' questions, says the study's first author, Jan Souman, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. The producers contacted Souman and his colleagues, who study perception and action, to find out if the common belief about walking in circles was true. "We didn't really know, but we thought it was an interesting question," Souman says. So the researchers collaborated with the program, resulting in an episode that aired in 2007.

One comment below the article is: "Actually, Kopfball is a lot like Myth Busters. Less spectacular mostly but somehow Myth Busters has yet to make it into a scientific journal I guess."