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52. A Mystery: Why Can't We Walk Straight?
1 year ago
Try as you might, you can't walk in a straight line without a visible guide point, like the Sun or a star. You might think you're walking straight, but as NPR's Robert Krulwich reports, a map of your route would reveal you are doomed to walk in circles.
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When you walk, you are using dozens of muscles and your whole body is shifting constantly. Between each step, you can try to bring yourself back to the same orientation, but there is no way you can get it exactly right. Add up very small errors and you get larger errors.
More subtle and useful question: Why do the errors seem not to sum to zero? People don't seem to be randomly deflecting, but preferring one side to the other. This could be explained by dominance of muscles, maybe, but I don't know.
But when compared with the original video hosted on NPR, npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/11/03/131050832/a-mystery-why-can-t-we-walk-straight, you can see that the aspect ratio for this version is a bit quirky!
I'm guessing the pixels weren't at a 1:1 ratio?
San Francisco Trip: vimeo.com/18075457
Just like a jetski on a lake, if you fall from it, it keeps going in circles so you can catch it.
my guess would be it's because when we move, the fluid in our inner ear (which tells our brain our position in space) starts to move around. unless you allow it to come to rest, it will always be slightly inaccurate in telling our body how it is oriented in space, leading to curves and diversions in our blindfolded path.
maybe we could have an international "try to walk straight" day - with GPS so prevalent it would be easy to do, and the world's largest science experiment :)
so ok, for my half-baked theory I would like to propose that
every step may be almost straight with some error rate/tolerance
if you walk for long enough you'll never go straight because the error rate will add up
is the question that people will always turn
or that people will always turn in a certain direction or not go in zig zag all the time ?
I think the question is the problem
what's the real question ? the question is not "why can't we walk straight"
:-)
However in the northern hemisphere the Coriolis effect goes to the left, and it seems like people in the video all turn to the right instead, so I'm probably completely wrong. It's still troubling that they all seem to turn in the same direction !
To know for sure, just repeat the experiment in Australia, and see if people turn in the other direction :-)
And it doesn't quite explain why the circles get smaller and smaller as you walk farther and farther.
@vic: The Coriolis effect is very, very tiny -- it affects huge things like weather systems, but the liquid in your ear is too small. Water in a sink doesn't drain in any particular direction in accordance with what hemisphere you're in (that one's a myth perpetuated by television).
excellent video!
More information about gyros and some sources at:
sensorwiki.org/doku.php/sensors/gyroscope
Article concerning replacing the vestibular organs with a gyroscope based prosthesis:
healthaffairs.uci.edu/hesp/publications/zeng30.pdf
I'm off to try same experiment myself now.
A beautiful animation with very interesting content, we navigate in the same way as many insects, we always need a fixed point of reference, this is why moths are confused by the flame.
Really really awesome animation too.
What possible mechanism would enable us to put consecutive steps within a fraction of degree of each other?
Try to build a robot to walk straight without external references; it would be impossible.
added to best of animation/stop-motion/puppets channel:
vimeo.com/channels/animationandpuppets
We can experiment with,
1. blind people
2. noiseless environment
3. different places.
4. Handedness
5. Postural stability
Those who want to experiment about this message me or contact:
aruna.z@gmail.com
twitter @arunaz
vimeo.com/channels/docoanim