When we don’t have a reference object in our environment, it can be extremely difficult to navigate in a straight line. Somewhat surprisingly, research shows that people will generally end up walking in circles, despite being instructed to walk in a straight trajectory. Said differently: the participants thought they were walking in a straight line, even though they were quickly dissolving into circular patterns. The hypothesis for this tendency includes a lack of directional cues as a source of this difficulty to walk in a straight line.

I’m trying to help my brother with his mathematics homework, and I find he’s struggling to understand what he should do. I try to nudge him in the right direction (without giving him the answer, of course), but he shrugs off my help. Frustrated because he knows I have the answer, he tells me, “Just give me the formula. That’s all I need.”

Like many young endurance athletes, I aspire to be competitive to the point that I can actually win races. In my mind, I feel like as soon as I can get to that point, I will have become a “real” competitive runner instead of this sub-par one that I am at the moment.

This happens to everyone: