Humans Can Only Walk In Circles and We Don't Know Why

*Check out the site for the video!)

Amplify’d from gizmodo.com

Humans can't walk in straight lines. If there's no fixed point of reference, we just walk in circles and inevitably get lost. Nobody knows why, but researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have confirmed it in several experiments.

If you walk, drive or sail blindfolded, in the middle of the fog or at night, with no stars in sight, you will not be able to keep a straight line. No matter how hard you try, you will end going in circles because, for some mysterious reason, humans have a tendency to lean to one side more than the other. Some people speculate that this is because one side of the brain is the dominating one. Others point out that the reason may be purely mechanical, because one of our legs is always sightly shorter than the other. But, according to the results of the study, these are not the causes for this unique behavior. At least, there's not one single explanation and it may be a combination of many. Read more at gizmodo.com

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Related articles

• Report: Without A Reference Point, We Walk In Circles (psychworld.com)
• Why Can't We Walk in Straight Lines? (freetech4teachers.com)
• Walk this sway (mindhacks.com)
• Humans Can Only Walk In Circles and We Don't Know Why [Video] (gizmodo.com)

Why happiness is actually a psychological disorder

Amplify’d from io9.com

Happiness is supposed to be a good thing, particularly when we're talking about the science of the mind. But at least one psychologist took a long, hard look at happiness and realized the grim truth: happiness is a psychiatric disorder.

We're guessing this is going to remain a minority view - indeed, there's an entire subfield of psychology that's essentially dedicated to increasing human happiness - but one must admit there's a certain logic to the argument. Here's why happiness, or, as it should more properly be called, "major affective disorder, pleasant type", is a psychiatric disorder:

"Happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains–that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant." Read more at io9.com

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Related articles

• Only crazy people are happy [Omni Brain] (scienceblogs.com)
• A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder (neatorama.com)
• A hazy memory of the happiness disorder (mindhacks.com)
• Why happiness is actually a psychological disorder [Mad Science] (io9.com)

Women vs. Male Divers

She dives like a girl
From Site:
Dive boats are no longer fueled with testosterone. Szilvia Gogh, founder of Miss-Scuba.com says that the man to women ratio is about three to one on dive boats this year, up from eight to one just ten years ago. You can tell the dive industry has caught on when you see gear with names like “Diva” and “She Dives”. We were particularly interested to notice that our web search also revealed a great number of women only dive clubs and classes. That prompted us to ask, what is the difference between men and women divers?
[via: http://www.scubagadget.com]

Does birth order condition what type of diver you are?

From Site:
Have you ever considered how your birth order might raise awareness of your behavior and personality traits, and how these might play a key role in the decisions you make underwater?
[via: http://www.travel-dive.com]