I’ve done it.

You’ve done it.

We are all guilty of it.

But why do we walk in circles when we are lost?

A great study, “Walking Straight into Circles” was reported on today in Current Biology and expanded upon in ScienceNOW with the article “Why we Walk in Circles.”

Seems when we are lost, and have no visual clue to use for course correction (Sun, Moon), our brain works hard to make sense of where we are headed. Problem is, without a visual endpoint, we tend to meander. Once we start down this slippery slope, our brain repeats tiny mistakes in direction and continually repeats these directional miscues bringing us right back where we started.

I remember once being told, perhaps by Tony Robbins, that a plane “on course” to Hawaii is of course 98% of the time and the pilot redirects the plane in tiny maneuvers to keep it going straight.

Now, it’s easy to throw in some crappy little quote here on “The need for a goal in life” and I suspect some reading this post will have already circled around to that conclusion. Oh, well.

I suggest another interpretation, a bit more biologically straight forward. When we walked out of Africa, or out of Eden, we followed the Sun. From the earliest hints of morning rising, we searched onward and used every last bit of available sunlight to highlight our steps.

Like Buried Logic, our need to follow the sun for direction is deeply embedded into our biology. Early on in human history, we walked where the light was.