The Body Knows Which Way to Turn
A group of researchers in Japan and Spain recently published a finding they stumbled onto by accident. They were studying social distancing behavior during the pandemic, watching video of people walking freely in enclosed spaces, when one of them noticed something odd. In 32 out of 33 experimental trials, people turned counterclockwise. Not because they were told to. Not because the space nudged them. Just because that's what bodies do, apparently, when left to their own devices.
They followed up with experiments in Spain and Japan, varied the group sizes, changed the environments, isolated for gender, culture, handedness, footedness, eye dominance. Nothing moved the needle in any meaningful way. The preference held. They published in Nature Communications with the scientific equivalent of a shrug: we don't know why this happens, but it happens. A Smithsonian Magazine writeup captures the delightfully accidental nature of the discovery.
The first guess most people land on is the Coriolis effect. It shapes hurricanes and ocean gyres, so maybe the same force tilts the body. It's a satisfying story. It's also wrong, or at least almost certainly wrong at human scale. The Coriolis effect is real but it operates at meteorological scales. At the scale of a person in a room, it's not just small, it's essentially unmeasurable.
You might push back here. What about toilets draining counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the south? Turns out that's a myth too, or at least a massive oversimplification. The Library of Congress puts it plainly: you can find both counterclockwise and clockwise drains in both hemispheres. What actually determines the direction is the shape of the basin and the angle at which the water enters. The famous equator bucket demonstrations you've seen performed for tourists, where a guide pours water on one side of the line and it spins one way, crosses to the other side and it spins the other, are essentially a trick. The guide controls the outcome with the angle of the pour. MIT researchers did demonstrate the Coriolis effect on a small basin in a lab, but as Slate explains, they had to let the water sit completely undisturbed for three weeks and drain it one drip at a time to eliminate every other variable. Nothing like a bucket.
And if you look at how the world's sacred traditions have handled directional movement, the Coriolis theory collapses further. Hindus and Buddhists often circumambulate their temples and stupas clockwise. Muslims circle the Kaaba at Mecca counterclockwise. Tibetan Buddhists walk clockwise around sacred sites, while practitioners of the older Bon religion walk counterclockwise around the same sites. These are all northern hemisphere traditions, making opposite choices. The direction wasn't determined by geography. It was determined by cosmology, by what each tradition decided the movement meant.
Which leaves the body's preference more mysterious, not less. The cultures that institutionalized clockwise movement did so on purpose, apparently overriding what the body naturally wants to do. That's worth sitting with.
What the researchers do suspect is a biomechanical asymmetry of some kind, something in the body's architecture that creates a preferential pull. But they can't say what. The neurological angle seems worth pursuing. The brain is strongly lateralized, and there's research suggesting people have a slight leftward bias in how they organize space perceptually. If turning counterclockwise keeps your dominant visual field oriented outward toward the environment, that's a candidate. But it's still speculation.
Here's what interests me more than the mechanism: the body is doing this before the mind has any say. Nobody decides to turn left. Nobody feels a pull and responds to it consciously. The preference just surfaces in aggregate, like a watermark in the paper of human movement. This is the same territory I've been circling in other essays, the blind spot we don't experience as a gap, the pool shot that arrives through the hands before it arrives through thought. The body has orientations the mind doesn't know about and isn't consulted on.
Contemplative traditions picked up on something like this, whether they understood the mechanism or not. Aboriginal ceremonial dance, practiced across hundreds of distinct language groups for at least 40,000 years, doesn't appear to encode a universal directional preference. Historical accounts describe corroboree performances with what one observer called a great lack of order and system, the movements changing at each performance. The direction wasn't the point. The story was the point, the Dreamtime narrative carried in the body's movement. And yet the question of direction kept mattering to traditions elsewhere, mattering enough to codify, to argue about, to split communities over.
I'm wondering whether the body simply knows something, and the traditions built their stories around what the body was already inclined to do, or chose to push against it deliberately, the way a river can be made to run uphill if the engineering is ambitious enough.
Supermarket designers apparently figured the natural pull out. Stores are often laid out to move shoppers counterclockwise, on the theory that right-handed people can push a cart with the left hand and reach for items with the right. That explanation is plausible but partial. The body's preference was probably already there, and retail psychology learned to work with it rather than against it.
Competitive racing circuits, from track and field to NASCAR to horse racing, run counterclockwise. The conventional explanation involves right-leg dominance. Again, plausible, and again, probably not the whole story.
The researcher quoted in the Smithsonian piece put it simply: we don't know why it happens, but we think that by understanding the reasons, we could better understand how we perceive the world. That's a larger claim than it sounds like. If there's a directional bias this fundamental and this invisible to us, built into the body at a level that crosses cultures and hemispheres and handedness, what else is down there? What other orientations are we living out without knowing it?
The mystics would say: quite a lot. The neuroscientists are starting to agree.