Good Lifestyle

We are all guilty of going out for ato stroll-What is it forexercise or to buygrocery stores-And, then immitter irreflectedly our phones to check the latest news alert or to scroll instagram. Well, a fascinating new study reveals why looking at your phone while walking in a public space among other people, it's not just a bad idea of ​​your safety andFor your mental healthBut it can also disrupt the world around you in a way that might surprise you.

Scientists in the field of "psychology of the crowd" have long worked to understand how human beings move and interact when they meet in large groups. They observed how crowds do not move randomly when they face places such as football stages, parks, shopping centers, but create natural models. Using visual benchmarks, we humans work in groups, like other animals, including flocks of birds, to create a subtle and powerful order that is really effective enough. "The human crowd is committed to a rich variety of self-organizational behaviors, [and] often exposes a fascinating" global "patterns that spread in a group over a range of interindividual interactions," observes the new study, Posted this week in the newspaperAdvance of science.

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For example, this can be surprising to learn that the moshpits with heavy metal rock emissions do not really constitute all this dangerous and messy. Rather the opposite. In the past, scientists have discovered that organizational structures are set up so that individual Moshers are not necessarily listened to at the moment. "There is a logic to this boiling boiling mass, although it may not be visible for foreigners"writing The BBC. "This logic keeps the fans of being trampled. In a remarkable way, it even means that Moshers moving in a rough circle will often meet where they started." In other words, they work.

This same logic applies essentially to all public spaces. But according to the new study - which was led by a professor at the Kyoto Institute of Technology -Just a few individuals launched in large groups in public spaces that consider their phones essentially eliminate the natural movements otherwise of the whole group. In addition, they slow down fundamentallyall."The distractions of the mobile phone have considerably influenced the overall walking speeds and the appearance of the training of the channels, especially when the distracted pedestrians were at the front of the group," concludes the study. "We have found that distracting pedestrians and unpackaged pedestrians have shifted or sudden steps to avoid imminent collisions, involving they had difficulty navigating."

The people who looked at their phones were walking differently. "The distracted people have not moved without clashes", observesThe New York Times, summarizing the study. "They took large walks on laterally or dodged others so that the researchers have rarely seen when there were no distractions. Inatient pedestrians of experience have induced this behavior in others Also; people who were not looked at their displaced phones in a more agitated mode than any other than when there was no turf. It appeared that a few people do not pay attention to navigation could change The behavior of all the crowd of more than 50 people. "

This is not the first study, of course, to highlight some of the negative side effects to look at your phone while walking. According to the statistics compiled by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS), nearly 40% of all the American say they have personally seen an "incident" resulting from pedestrians distracted on their phones. "Today, more and more people fall on the stairs, stumble on borders and other streetcaps and, in many cases, entering the traffic, causing cuts, bruises, sprains and fractures ","saidAlan Hilibrand, MD, President of the AAOS Communication Cabinet. "In fact, the number of pedestrian injuries using their phones has more than doubled since 2004, and surveys have shown that 60% of pedestrians are distracted by other activities while walking."

So, for your health and the quality of foot traffic around you, make sure you stop and walk on the side if you need SMS or Scroll Instagram. And for more things you should not do while you walked in the world on foot, be sure to read The worst errors you make while walking, say experts .