Nearly Everyone, Everywhere, Veers Left When Walking - The New York Times

Researchers are at a loss for why people across cultures and ages, regardless of their dominant hand, have a natural bias toward wandering in a counterclockwise direction. By Rachel Nuwer Iñaki Echeverría-Huarte, an applied physicist at the University of Navarra in Spain, was studying whether people maintain a certain distance between one another while walking when he noticed something strange. Across some 40 experiments, most of his participants spontaneously veered to the left. Although this observation had nothing to do with his original research, it piqued his curiosity. “This was the first signal that something weird was happening,” Dr. Echeverría-Huarte said. He and his colleagues assumed there must be a straightforward explanation. Perhaps the layout of the room, for example, was subtly directing people to list to the left. They began what they thought would be a simple investigation to find the answer. Five years later, Dr. Echeverría-Huarte and his colleagues have exhausted mo

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