At a guess I would put it down to this .

one of the main ways we know we are going left or right when blind folded and with no other stimuli would be by using inner ear ,

the inner ear probably lacks a calibration centre point or awareness of when it is in a central aligned posistoin and relies on the eyes or other senses for it to be calibrated as its centre point.

what happens is the inner ear sensing changes due to general movement or variations in persons leaning , vibrations or lateral Gs. however because it has no resting point or definitive centre the person percives it that they need to compensate and as a result ends up moving arounf in cercals ,

the cercals get tighter and tighter as the persons perception of the inner ear remains off and they keep turning extra to compensate.

Another thing to remember is that when walking we are constantly correcting for many, many different things. We correct for the different weight we put into each step due to undulations in the ground or due to random muscular differences producing more or less accurate placing of the feet and so on and so on. All the time, constant corrections, each step correcting for the last, and making it's own mistakes, and then being corrected for itself in the next step.

The puzzle would be if someone was able to walk in a straight line given all these factors. The fact that we walk in circles when a reference point is removed seems to be completely obvious. It can only be this way, I don't understand why this is strange.

The simple answer to the question why can't people walk in a straight line when blidfolded is that you've removed their point of reference that they use to get direction from. All these experiments tell us that we need visual stimulus to be able to walk in a straight line. The experiments answer the question.

The other mechanisms in our bodies can be relied on for short periods of time, but we keep needing to look up to see where we're going.

uhm.. maybe cause they're blindfolded. = /

Can do true blind people do better in going straight? I know they can hear better than people who can see.

*science

Adding video to channels (Science) - requested by ant.

So if straight people walk in circles, do gay people walk straight? TO THE LABORATORY!!! =)

Do people in Australia walk left in circles while blindfolded?
And why would you move the wheel of the car at all if you thought you were going straight?
Doing these tests on uneven surfaces might be effecting the outcome.

Until the driving bit, I would have thought it had something to do with a dominant side. Otherwise, we would not go in circles, but weave all over the place. But then again, the car did predominantly go clockwise so maybe there is still something about a dominant side. I think overcorrecting may also play a part.

Well, this has nothing to do with walking straight, but just though I'd mention:

Stand on one foot and spread your arms. You can balance pretty well.

Do the same thing, but close your eyes. It gtets a lot harder all of a sudden!

Balance and eyesight befinitely go together. Maybe the circling thing is related to this..

interesting stuff. neat question about whether blind people are better at straight walking (@ant); can you train yourself to get better at this task?

what about other animals?

also, why straight? Why not say "hey, walk in a big circle and tell me when you think you're back here"? Maybe we're stellar at that.

I can't think of a particularly good reason why we should be awesome at walking straight; seems to me that we should be awesome at collecting and recollecting cues that help us navigate the world, which might actually be easier if we're storming around in a non-straight way (filling in a more complete map of our surroundings).

I liked the artwork of the video...looks cool.

I'm wondering...you're blindfolded but suppose a bit of sun creeps in. Would you be able to keep in more or less a straight line by judging the light on your face?

This is why people get lost in the wilderness not far from civilization for inordinate amounts of time.

If you're lost to the point where you've decided to pick a random direction and start walking and hope for the best, make sure you pick a truly stationary reference like a mountain. If you're talking about several hours of walking, the sun and moon are not good choices.

Sounds like the Coriolis effect to me.

Yeah, must be relativity, they are walking straight, it's just the rest of the world that's curved.

For some reason i found this video really enjoyable.

It is *blocked, thanks Sony

This video has been flagged as having an embed that is Region Blocked to not function in certain geographical locations - declared blocked by dingens.

4 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.