Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So with short stuff, it is short stuff. Why don't you like short Stuff? You're bringing me down? Okay, I felt sure, you're going Bill Murray there, I don't remember him saying you're bringing me down? Yeah, I think that was what he's saying in the Star Wars when he sang the words the Star Wars, you're bringing me down? Remember that far Uh we are not talking about that though, we're talking about directional walking. And this is from our old colleagues at house stuffworks dot com and uh not our old colleagues, but we used to use cracked all the time. I used to love that site. Second to Jack O'Brien days. Yeah, I guess Jack O'Brien is now our colleague and has been for a while, so we're one degree removed. Check out the Daily Zeitgeist if you don't all ready great show. Yep, Jack and Miles in the game. That's right. What else you've been on that show? I haven't twice. They're gonna ask you a third time before they asked me. I would love that. I even had those guys a movie crush. I know, right, that's okay, this will get back to them somehow, somehow, some way. So Chuck that we're not talking about daily zeitgeist today. We're not. We're talking about something entirely different, which is the direction that people tend to move in. That's right. And uh, generally if you walk into like an amusement park or a store, and we'll talk about shopping kind of towards the end. In general, in the United States, people tend to go in and move to the right to a place and are indeed subtly or not so subtly steered to go to the right. Yeah, but from what I understand, it's like a amplifying our natural tendency to move to the right, at least in the United States and in Great Britain Japan. Um, we need to hear from you because we are being told that you guys tend to move to the left. Like, say, when you enter a grocery store, do you, guys, and this is a question to you in the UK and in Japan, when you enter a grocery store, do you move to the left or do you move to the right? Really, stop and think about it and then email and let us know. Okay, because supposedly you guys moved to the left, we moved to the right. And there's some pretty interesting explanations for why. Yeah. I mean, I can say anecdotally, and I think you can agree with this. If you go to London or something and you're from the United States, you're gonna be bumping into people a lot because they also tend, I think, to walk down the left side of like a hallway as opposed to the right side. Isn't that correct, like maniacs? Yeah? Uh. And when you look at sports fields, like the way you run bases or race a car or a horse or a or RaSE your legs, that is done in a you know, human Yeah, I've just never uh, that is counterclockwise. And they've you know, they found that when people walk up to like a track to go running, they instinctively moved to the right, which is counterclockwise and jibes with how sports are done. Right. But then put differently, that's when you're entering like a field of action from the outside. If you imagine the field of action being bounded by a circle. When you enter that field of action, you enter the circle you move to the right, which takes you counter clockwise. But if you're already in the circle and you decide to just start taking right turns, you're actually moving clockwise, which is brain busting if you think about it. Okay, I literally did not understand that until you just said it that way. I I. That's because it was really poorly put. Yeah. I did not get it at all, because I was like, doesn't matter like which way you're facing to begin with, but if you continue to take rights, is what the key? Because you know, three wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left. Is that how it goes, especially if you say it like that. Uh. They've done some studies over the years because they thought handedness might have something to do with it, and this was in the Association of for Psychological Science is where it was printed. It sounds, but they it does. They did find though, that lefties tend to prefer the left side and right he's like the right. And they even studied stroke patients who lost use of their dominant hand and found that over time they had to reverse a natural bias to favor what was their original dominant hand, with with which way they would go and these studies were very very important in helping later determine how to best share a TwixT. Bar I was wondered, what was going coming up there? Do you you want to take a break real quick? Sure? Okay, we're gonna come back and keep talking about the direction people tend to move, All right, Chuck, So you kind of said it. One thing that has been used to explain why people move in certain directions UM has to do with possibly has to do with the side of the road that you drive on. And yes, anecdotally, if you're in America and you're walking down the hallway, you're probably walking on the right side, your right side, yes, not your left side, because then you would probably bump into a lot of people. That's just kind of how things are laid out. So it does make sense that we would kind of move to the right. Um. And the reason why it would be significant if you know, people in the UK um go to the left in a store, where in America they moved to the right is because humans are animals, And it turns out there there aren't any geographical differences in migration direction among wild animals non human animals. UM, they tend to just go the same way. Wherever every member of their species goes anywhere in the world, that's the direction they'll go. It's not like if one, one group of the species of gophers lives in North America and they go to the last and then the African family of gophers moved to the right when they migrate, That's not how it goes. They'll all all gophers move, say, clockwise instead right. And these patterns that are generally based on aid from the wind if you're a bird, any kind of uh weather weather pattern like a solar pathway maybe. Um. The interesting thing in that we uh as far as clockwise, Like I've never really stopped to think why clockwise is clock one o'clock didn't go the other way? But it's based on the sun dial, And it's based on specifically a northern hemispheric sun dial, because that's the way the sun will cast in the northern hemisphere. If it was based on a southern hemispheric sun dial, then the clock would literally you know, the one and the two and the three would be to the left of noon. Yeah, and just calling it clockwise kind of begs the question, you know, like it's a human constructed direction. But we it seems like the most natural thing in the world because not only is it called clockwise, it's counter clockwise, which makes it seem radical and in opposition of the natural order of things to move left word rather than right word right. The only thing weirder than seeing a clock that would be laid out in reverse would be to see a base pop player hit a ball and run to third base. That would be very, very strange to my brain, would be especially if somebody was timing with the stopwatch that was running counterclockwise. I wish Japan did that, because Japanese baseball huge. That is huge. That would be so cool is if they just ran in the opposite direction and that was kind of like their thing they could. I mean, intramural games between American MLB teams and Japanese teams would be a total mess, but it'd be super entertaining to watch. And then you've always got the one guy that just runs straight past the picture towards second depending on I'm just going there and depending on whose rules you were playing like, that person would always be out because you just have to throw the first base or third third base. They'd also be a double specialist. I guess. Um. One way this can come into play those in architecture, because architects like to have fun, and that if they're designing something that they want to make you feel sort of either ill at e is or just sort of get your neurons firing in a different way. They can sort of drive you left in the United States out of the bat and put things of more interest on the left. Because and it's you know, it's pretty subtle. It's not like some radical ship when you walk in you're like, oh my god, what's happening. But you know, moving people in a different direction counter to what they usually move can can make your brain do different things. That's pretty neat. I love that. Um. That's if you want to like stimulate people in a weird way and make them slightly uncomfortable. In grocery stores and retail stores where you want people to feel totally comfortable so they want to stay long and spend lots of money there, you want to do the opposite. You want to kind of go with the natural flow, and we've done We've talked about this extensively in videos think other podcasts about how they lay out grocery stores to basically I hate to use the word manipulate you, but manipulate you into you know, shelling out as much cash as possible. And a big part of that is funneling you to the right and then placing things strategically in that counterclockwise motion that they expect you to move through the store in. Yeah, it's I'd never think about it, even though we've talked about it a lot, But I can't think of a single grocery store I go to where the produce and stuff isn't on the right, and eventually you wind your way around and on the left are like the frozen foods and ice cream and stuff like that. And the idea is that if you go in and go to the right and there's all the kind of junk food, you might just get that and leave and not er go not spend as much money. I probably choose airgo wrong. But uh, what they do is they wind you around to the right, where you buy like your produce and the things that you need, and then on your way technically on your way out of that counterclockwise circle. That's when you're gonna do the impulse buys and say like, oh well, let me have those those chips in that ice cream or that whatever, that whip cream that it's cool whip that ate straight out of the bucket. Well, it's just because it's so so good, so good. Remember the peanut butter cool whip combo. No oh yeah, yeah, I told you. I got on that right after you told me it's so dangerous though. Well, I mean, we can't keep cool ap in our house. It's it's gone in a matter of a day and a half. We just can't do it. Like we'll get it for for Thanksgiving, for like pumpkin pie, and I always get an extra because I know that the pumpkin pot is not gonna have anything, because Emily and I are just sneaking in there like a spoonful at a time. And my daughter doesn't know yet. When she's introduced to that, it's all over because the freezer is low enough, right, and you have plenty of stools, handy yeah, and fingers or spoons. So now that the way you just describe the grocery store, now they think about it. Every grocery store I've gone into. The pharmacy is the last thing to your left when you go in, and there's basically no way to get directly to it. You have to go through other stuff and then they give you the opposite At my public is that right, the pharmamer she is. It's the first thing on the right when you walk in. I'm thinking publics too. I guess I'm I'm in a different design or a different dimension. Maybe there's a barren sting effect going on. Weird. Yeah, so, um, you got anything else about the way people move? No? I mean this last thing is kind of funny. They did a test in a store in Philadelphia where they tried to funnel people to the left by putting up like palettes and all these big things that block your way, and people were like literally crawling over palets just so they could go to the right. It's it's pretty funny. Philly Strong, that's right. So since Chuck said Philly Strong, everybody, of course, that means that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So with short stuff, it is short stuff. Why don't you like short Stuff? You're bringing me down? Okay, I felt sure, you're going Bill Murray there, I don't remember him saying you're bringing me down? Yeah, I think that was what he's saying in the Star Wars when he sang the words the Star Wars, you're bringing me down? Remember that far Uh we are not talking about that though, we're talking about directional walking. And this is from our old colleagues at house stuffworks dot com and uh not our old colleagues, but we used to use cracked all the time. I used to love that site. Second to Jack O'Brien days. Yeah, I guess Jack O'Brien is now our colleague and has been for a while, so we're one degree removed. Check out the Daily Zeitgeist if you don't all ready great show. Yep, Jack and Miles in the game. That's right. What else you've been on that show? I haven't twice. They're gonna ask you a third time before they asked me. I would love that. I even had those guys a movie crush. I know, right, that's okay, this will get back to them somehow, somehow, some way. So Chuck that we're not talking about daily zeitgeist today. We're not. We're talking about something entirely different, which is the direction that people tend to move in. That's right. And uh, generally if you walk into like an amusement park or a store, and we'll talk about shopping kind of towards the end. In general, in the United States, people tend to go in and move to the right to a place and are indeed subtly or not so subtly steered to go to the right. Yeah, but from what I understand, it's like a amplifying our natural tendency to move to the right, at least in the United States and in Great Britain Japan. Um, we need to hear from you because we are being told that you guys tend to move to the left. Like, say, when you enter a grocery store, do you, guys, and this is a question to you in the UK and in Japan, when you enter a grocery store, do you move to the left or do you move to the right? Really, stop and think about it and then email and let us know. Okay, because supposedly you guys moved to the left, we moved to the right. And there's some pretty interesting explanations for why. Yeah. I mean, I can say anecdotally, and I think you can agree with this. If you go to London or something and you're from the United States, you're gonna be bumping into people a lot because they also tend, I think, to walk down the left side of like a hallway as opposed to the right side. Isn't that correct, like maniacs? Yeah? Uh. And when you look at sports fields, like the way you run bases or race a car or a horse or a or RaSE your legs, that is done in a you know, human Yeah, I've just never uh, that is counterclockwise. And they've you know, they found that when people walk up to like a track to go running, they instinctively moved to the right, which is counterclockwise and jibes with how sports are done. Right. But then put differently, that's when you're entering like a field of action from the outside. If you imagine the field of action being bounded by a circle. When you enter that field of action, you enter the circle you move to the right, which takes you counter clockwise. But if you're already in the circle and you decide to just start taking right turns, you're actually moving clockwise, which is brain busting if you think about it. Okay, I literally did not understand that until you just said it that way. I I. That's because it was really poorly put. Yeah. I did not get it at all, because I was like, doesn't matter like which way you're facing to begin with, but if you continue to take rights, is what the key? Because you know, three wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left. Is that how it goes, especially if you say it like that. Uh. They've done some studies over the years because they thought handedness might have something to do with it, and this was in the Association of for Psychological Science is where it was printed. It sounds, but they it does. They did find though, that lefties tend to prefer the left side and right he's like the right. And they even studied stroke patients who lost use of their dominant hand and found that over time they had to reverse a natural bias to favor what was their original dominant hand, with with which way they would go and these studies were very very important in helping later determine how to best share a TwixT. Bar I was wondered, what was going coming up there? Do you you want to take a break real quick? Sure? Okay, we're gonna come back and keep talking about the direction people tend to move, All right, Chuck, So you kind of said it. One thing that has been used to explain why people move in certain directions UM has to do with possibly has to do with the side of the road that you drive on. And yes, anecdotally, if you're in America and you're walking down the hallway, you're probably walking on the right side, your right side, yes, not your left side, because then you would probably bump into a lot of people. That's just kind of how things are laid out. So it does make sense that we would kind of move to the right. Um. And the reason why it would be significant if you know, people in the UK um go to the left in a store, where in America they moved to the right is because humans are animals, And it turns out there there aren't any geographical differences in migration direction among wild animals non human animals. UM, they tend to just go the same way. Wherever every member of their species goes anywhere in the world, that's the direction they'll go. It's not like if one, one group of the species of gophers lives in North America and they go to the last and then the African family of gophers moved to the right when they migrate, That's not how it goes. They'll all all gophers move, say, clockwise instead right. And these patterns that are generally based on aid from the wind if you're a bird, any kind of uh weather weather pattern like a solar pathway maybe. Um. The interesting thing in that we uh as far as clockwise, Like I've never really stopped to think why clockwise is clock one o'clock didn't go the other way? But it's based on the sun dial, And it's based on specifically a northern hemispheric sun dial, because that's the way the sun will cast in the northern hemisphere. If it was based on a southern hemispheric sun dial, then the clock would literally you know, the one and the two and the three would be to the left of noon. Yeah, and just calling it clockwise kind of begs the question, you know, like it's a human constructed direction. But we it seems like the most natural thing in the world because not only is it called clockwise, it's counter clockwise, which makes it seem radical and in opposition of the natural order of things to move left word rather than right word right. The only thing weirder than seeing a clock that would be laid out in reverse would be to see a base pop player hit a ball and run to third base. That would be very, very strange to my brain, would be especially if somebody was timing with the stopwatch that was running counterclockwise. I wish Japan did that, because Japanese baseball huge. That is huge. That would be so cool is if they just ran in the opposite direction and that was kind of like their thing they could. I mean, intramural games between American MLB teams and Japanese teams would be a total mess, but it'd be super entertaining to watch. And then you've always got the one guy that just runs straight past the picture towards second depending on I'm just going there and depending on whose rules you were playing like, that person would always be out because you just have to throw the first base or third third base. They'd also be a double specialist. I guess. Um. One way this can come into play those in architecture, because architects like to have fun, and that if they're designing something that they want to make you feel sort of either ill at e is or just sort of get your neurons firing in a different way. They can sort of drive you left in the United States out of the bat and put things of more interest on the left. Because and it's you know, it's pretty subtle. It's not like some radical ship when you walk in you're like, oh my god, what's happening. But you know, moving people in a different direction counter to what they usually move can can make your brain do different things. That's pretty neat. I love that. Um. That's if you want to like stimulate people in a weird way and make them slightly uncomfortable. In grocery stores and retail stores where you want people to feel totally comfortable so they want to stay long and spend lots of money there, you want to do the opposite. You want to kind of go with the natural flow, and we've done We've talked about this extensively in videos think other podcasts about how they lay out grocery stores to basically I hate to use the word manipulate you, but manipulate you into you know, shelling out as much cash as possible. And a big part of that is funneling you to the right and then placing things strategically in that counterclockwise motion that they expect you to move through the store in. Yeah, it's I'd never think about it, even though we've talked about it a lot, But I can't think of a single grocery store I go to where the produce and stuff isn't on the right, and eventually you wind your way around and on the left are like the frozen foods and ice cream and stuff like that. And the idea is that if you go in and go to the right and there's all the kind of junk food, you might just get that and leave and not er go not spend as much money. I probably choose airgo wrong. But uh, what they do is they wind you around to the right, where you buy like your produce and the things that you need, and then on your way technically on your way out of that counterclockwise circle. That's when you're gonna do the impulse buys and say like, oh well, let me have those those chips in that ice cream or that whatever, that whip cream that it's cool whip that ate straight out of the bucket. Well, it's just because it's so so good, so good. Remember the peanut butter cool whip combo. No oh yeah, yeah, I told you. I got on that right after you told me it's so dangerous though. Well, I mean, we can't keep cool ap in our house. It's it's gone in a matter of a day and a half. We just can't do it. Like we'll get it for for Thanksgiving, for like pumpkin pie, and I always get an extra because I know that the pumpkin pot is not gonna have anything, because Emily and I are just sneaking in there like a spoonful at a time. And my daughter doesn't know yet. When she's introduced to that, it's all over because the freezer is low enough, right, and you have plenty of stools, handy yeah, and fingers or spoons. So now that the way you just describe the grocery store, now they think about it. Every grocery store I've gone into. The pharmacy is the last thing to your left when you go in, and there's basically no way to get directly to it. You have to go through other stuff and then they give you the opposite At my public is that right, the pharmamer she is. It's the first thing on the right when you walk in. I'm thinking publics too. I guess I'm I'm in a different design or a different dimension. Maybe there's a barren sting effect going on. Weird. Yeah, so, um, you got anything else about the way people move? No? I mean this last thing is kind of funny. They did a test in a store in Philadelphia where they tried to funnel people to the left by putting up like palettes and all these big things that block your way, and people were like literally crawling over palets just so they could go to the right. It's it's pretty funny. Philly Strong, that's right. So since Chuck said Philly Strong, everybody, of course, that means that short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.