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News: The path less travelled feels shorter
The more times we have walked a route, the longer we judge it to be, a UK researcher has confirmed. His studies could help explain why daily commutes can grow to seem interminably long, he tells [email protected].
Andrew Crompton asked 140 architecture students from Manchester University to estimate the distance from the student-union building to familiar destinations along a straight road, so to guess the length of journeys they would have strolled (or staggered) many times. First-year students estimated a mile-long path to be around 1.24 miles on average, whereas third year students stretched it to 1.45 miles.
The results match a theory that distances elongate in our minds because, over time, we begin to notice more and more details about a route. To test this further, Crompton asked a group of students to estimate 500 metres in the cluttered tourist village of Portmeirion, Wales, and again on a road in Manchester city. The village distance seemed further.
The findings could help to explain why the walk to a destination sometimes feels shorter than the journey back. And, notes Crompton, it could help architects design cities that feel more spacious, simply by packing in more details for people to look at.
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