Mountains Out Of Molehills - Brief Article

WHEN YOU STAND AT THE BOTTOM OF a hill, the impending climb may look a lot worse than it really is, says psychologist Dennis Proffitt of the University of Virginia. In tests of several hundred people, he determined that they consistently overestimated the slant of shallow hills, judging 5-degree slants to be about 20 degrees. Surprisingly; the same subjects could accurately mimic the angle when asked to demonstrate it with a flat board.

Proffitt sees a good reason for this mental disconnect. Your instinctive mind needs to move your legs to match the real inclination of the hill, but the conscious brain has to decide how much energy to expend. A mental mechanism that causes the eye to overestimate the task at hand helps prevent you from overexerting yourself. "Metric truth is not biologically useful. You want to see your relationship with the world and what you can do," says Proffitt.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Discover
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group