907 - Circle walking

I had this happen to me the other day. I've been in a particular neighborhood many times. But I always enter it from a certain direction. I came in from a different direction and had to sit at an intersection and think "which way do I turn?". I found this article at ..... someplace.

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With countless thousands of Americans hitting the hiking trails this month for one last summer adventure, it’s a sure bet that some of them will get lost along the way. Those fortunate enough to make it back may be convinced that they spent hours walking in circles.

Scientists in Germany reported Thursday that this often-described sense of lost-hiker déjà vu, of having inadvertently backtracked while wandering in the woods, is real. “People really do walk in circles,” said Jan L. Souman of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen.

Dr. Souman, who studies multisensory perception, and his colleagues tracked the movements of volunteers sent into the wilds of a German forest and the desert sands of Tunisia. As long as the sun or moon was out, the volunteers were able to walk in a straight line, more or less. But on cloudy days or when the moon went down they looped back on themselves, often several times.

Under those conditions, Dr. Souman said, the brain appears to be lacking a fundamental visual cue to help make sense of the jumble of other data it is receiving.

“The brain has different sources of information for almost everything,” said Dr. Souman, who admitted to having walked in circles for hours once in the urban jungle that is Istanbul. There’s a complicated interplay of different senses, he said. Those cues — images flowing over the retina, the sense of acceleration or turning in the inner ear, even how the muscles and bones are moving — are combined in the brain to give a sense of where the body is going.

“But all those information sources are kind of relative,” he said. “They don’t tell you you are moving in the same direction as an hour ago.” For that, a view of the sun or moon or a prominent landmark like a distant mountaintop seems necessary. “You need those kinds of absolute cues,” he said.

The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, don’t surprise many back-country guides, rescuers and other hiking experts, who say that to avoid walking in circles or otherwise getting lost, hikers should rely on a simple compass, or a more complicated device like a G.P.S. unit, rather than themselves.

“You cannot trust your own senses at all,” said Carol Stone White, an author and editor who has chronicled hikers’ exploits, awesome and otherwise, in “Adirondack Peak Experiences” and other books.

Just about everybody who has spent considerable time in the woods has probably experienced being lost and feeling like they’ve become turned around, said Carroll M. Ware, a licensed Maine guide. “If they’ll admit it,” he added.