You are in a new city, it’s unfamiliar and you need to get to a place that’s close by. You don’t want to take public transport, nor do you want to pay an exorbitant fare for a taxi. So, you whip up Google maps, check out your destination and walk towards the general direction.

Or you’re on a road trip and decide to go somewhere that’s not one of the popular tourist destinations. You whip up Google Maps again, but it doesn’t suggest any routes. You decide to navigate by instinct, check out all the routes and choose the one you think is the shortest.

Most of us will have done this at some point in our lives. Using Google Maps to navigate cities or just about any place, is pretty useful. But, have you ever wondered if the shortest route you are choosing, is actually the shortest and most efficient?

Turns out human brains are terrible at navigation.

When given the choice between the most efficient, but twisty route and a straight but longer and less efficient route, our brains always choose the straight ones, according to new research.

It seems our brains are fundamentally hardwired to face the general direction that wants to reach, even if going that way is not efficient.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Computational Science, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have revealed that people generally tend to take the “pointiest path” while walking, even if it takes longer to reach the destination.

The researchers analysed data sets of around 14,000 people who walked to schools, workplaces, and more every day. They found that pedestrians seemed more likely to choose routes that pointed directly towards their destinations, although they were longer than other shorter, but less “pointier” routes.

Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This behaviour is known as vector-based navigation, and according to the researchers it has also been studied in other forms of life such as primates, insects, and mammals. Vector-based navigation requires less thinking, as you don’t need to calculate the shortest available path.

This frees up more brainpower to focus on other more important things, like surviving through the trip by watching out for enemies and predators. While modern humans don’t have to worry about these things anymore, until a few decades ago, these were very real threats faced by humans during travel.

“Vector-based navigation does not produce the shortest path, but it’s close enough to the shortest path, and it’s very simple to compute it,” said Carlo Ratti, lead author of the paper and a professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, in a press release. “It allows our brain to be used for other things — 30,000 years ago, to avoid a lion, or now, to avoid a perilous SUV.”

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