With the colder weather outside I have started to do my daily hour long walk inside the house. 2 stories + basement making a loop around the kitchen table, then dining room table, upstairs into the guest bedroom down the stairs, through the living room and down the basement stairs looping around them and back upstairs to the kitchen table.
I noticed in the first few days of walking every turn was toward the left except one, basically counter-clockwise the way my house is set up. I the tried walking the other direction where the turns are toward the right, and frankly, it felt really weird/unnatural.
Any factual reason for this as to why one way (turning left) seems natural and the other way (turning right) seems uncomfortable? I did do several days of turning right but still didn’t seem “right”. On my outside walks this preference doesn’t show up, just when walking inside my house.
I am left eye dominant (but right handed) if that would make a difference.
Just a guess here, but most humans have one leg that’s dominant, just like we have dominant hands, and like hands, it’s usually the right one. And it’s probably easier to have your dominant leg on the outside of a turn.
How does a supermarket have a clockwise/counterclockwise direction? Any supermarket I’ve been in is designed to be traversed boustrophedonically (“as the ox plows the field”).
Interesting. When I skate – I’m only an average skater – I can only do hockey stops rotating counterclockwise (left). Hockey stopping clockwise I can’t do. Similarly, crossovers to the left feel natural. Crossovers to the right, while I can do them, feel awkward.
Pshaw. It’s the perfect word to describe walking up one and aisle and down the next as you cross the store.
I’ve also used it to describe the way to lay out large value resistors on an integrated circuit (sounds much cooler than the alternate word “meandering”).
I definitely prefer to start my boustrophedonic journey on the left side of the store and work to the right; starting on the right feels off somehow.
I shop boustrophedonically too, but my starting and ending points depend on the layout of the products rather than a preference for a direction. I tend to start in the bakery aisle and move toward the fruit/vegetable aisle, for no good reason, and then finish with any meat and frozen food, so it stays as cold as possible. In the Safeway I shop at most often, that means starting on the right; in another Safeway I sometimes shop at, that means starting on the left. So even the same retailer doesn’t lay out their stores in a consistent direction.
I can tell you that there are raging battles about whether putting the entrance to a grocery store and the produce section on the left (starting the shoppers in a clockwise route) or on the right (counterclockwise routing) is better.
Everyone has a bias in their walk. This is why we tend to go in circles if we get lost in a forest. You can see it by aligning yourself with a sports field, putting on a blindfold and walking forward naturally. You’ll find you curve in one direction or another and probably won’t hit the far end.
I suspect though, that the OP situation is probably just one way having been imprinted in the brain before changing. Thus you have to override your automatic response each turn.
One way to avoid this is to pick an easy landmark off in the distance, and walk to that point while dragging a stick. When you get to that point, line up your stick with another obvious landmark in the distance, and walk to that. This will keep you going in a straight line, or at least straight enough so that you won’t go around in circles.
Another way to make sure you don’t walk around in circles is to find a stream and follow it downstream. This will get you to larger streams, etc. until you get to a decent sized river. Even if you are lost somewhere in the Amazon Rain Forest, eventually you’ll hit civilization. There aren’t any rivers left in the world that are completely devoid of civilization.
Do you have a preference of walking with traffic (turning right) or against (turning left)? When I was running a lot, I would go against traffic (on the left side) on certain roads where I wanted to see oncoming traffic, in case I needed to take evasive action.
I’m also left-eye dominant, so I feel like I can see things first on my left than on my right.
Market research found that people tend to go to the right side of a store after entering. That’s most likely because the majority of people are right-handed. Such research also found that putting the produce and bakery sections near the entrance is best, because the farmer’s-market-like display of produce imparts the best first impression on the shopper (same for the floral section), and the smell of baked goods makes people hungrier. The deli and meat counters tend to spin off of that area around the perimeter of the store where you have back-of-house spaces for processing and walk-in refrigeration, etc.
Then you end up around back at the dairy section because they want you to walk as far as possible, preferably through the snack aisles, to get milk. Those are also often stored in walk-in refrigerators that also have customer-facing doors, so they generally need to be on the periphery of the store. If there’s a pharmacy with a drive-thru window then that tends to leave the left side as the only other one available.
So there seems to be something of a counter-clockwise directionality, at least in the sense of entering, veering right, then zig-zagging through the aisles from right to left in the back half of the store before getting to the checkouts at the front left. Of course there’s variations, and I think all this is yet another case of late-stage capitalism trying to squeeze out small fractions of a percent (or at best very low single-digit percentages) of extra sales. Then of course, it becomes self-reinforcing when the design of entrances and exits force these flow patterns.
I had a gym teacher tell the class to decide which way we naturally turned, and to always twist that way for some acrobatic thing. So that teacher believed that everyone has a preferred direction, but not all people have the same preferred direction.
Have you ever seen the specs for a track? Everything is spelled out in a multi, multi-page document; the height of the curb on the inside rail, how far that is from Lane 1, the width of the lane lines, etc. I’m not sure why they’re counterclockwise but they’re all the same it they’re built for competition.
Pedestrians should walk (run) facing traffic while cyclists should go in the direction of traffic.