Why can't a blindfolded person walk straight?

When we see lost people in the cinema who cannot go to the right place, we are outraged at the stupidity of the director, although there is nothing strange about this! If you don't believe me, try blindfolding yourself and walking far enough in a straight line. You will be surprised that a person cannot walk straight without visible landmarks. But why?

Unfortunately, unlike many birds, humans do not have a special organ that helps them navigate through space using a geomagnetic field. Also, we do not have any natural gyroscope that allows us to keep a set direction, like gyroscopes on ships and airplanes.

Despite the fact that our vestibular apparatus tracks body turns, in order to maintain the desired direction, they need to be summed up so that, as a result, right and left turns compensate for each other. Walking cannot be perfectly uniform, given the terrain, numerous small deviations and turns accumulate, and each next step deviates by a small amount from the previous one, therefore, without external landmarks, the movement differs more and more from the given direction.

A person cannot walk straight without a reference point, because he needs a reference point for orientation in space. If there is no landmark in front of a person, then it is difficult for him to maintain a straight line of movement.

Over many years of studying this issue, scientists have come to the common conclusion that a person definitely cannot walk straight without seeing an external landmark or landmarks. One of these experiments was conducted by German scientist Jan Suman, who blindfolded his subjects in various locations such as the desert, beach and forest, offering them a direct route. Each time, he tracked the movement of people. All the study participants were sure that they were walking straight, but when they saw the tracker data, they couldn't believe their eyes! People didn't just deviate slightly from a straight line, they literally started walking in circles.

According to a study published in 2009 in the journal Current Biology, all people who try to walk straight through the forest or desert in cloudy weather will certainly start to get lost, and their path turns out to be, although not circular, but self-intersecting.