This story began, like so many in the history of science, with something we were not looking for.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were studying a practical question: how do people move around in an enclosed space when you ask them to keep apart from one another? Watching the footage time after time, we noticed something odd: Almost every participant walked in loops that turned in the same direction, always anticlockwise. Stranger still, none of them seemed to have noticed they were doing it.
That observation sent us on a five-year quest to work out why humans behave in this way.
The effect itself is easy to describe. Let a crowd roam within a closed space with no particular destination, and it slowly begins to rotate, almost always to the left. Nobody directs that motion. Nobody decides it.
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