Research, the brain does not choose the shortest route into town

The brain does not choose the shortest way when we have to choose a path. To shed light on this behavior is a study by the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the CNR of Pisa, carried out in collaboration with the MIT of Boston and the Polytechnic of Turin, which demonstrates how pedestrians choose the paths without calculating the shortest one to reach the destination. To carry out the research, the study used walking mobility data from 14,000 people. The work – published in Nature Computational Science – could be strategic to better design the cities of the future thanks to more effective and safer and also more pleasant movements of citizens. In the study, the researchers explain that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but when we walk through a city, the direct path to the destination may not be possible. So how do we decide which path to take? The new study – carried out by a team of the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council (CnrIit) of Pisa in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and with the Polytechnic of Turin – shows that our brain is not optimized to calculate the so-called ‘shortest path’ when the movement is pedestrian. The research team analyzed a data set of over 550,000 walking trips of over 14,000 people in Boston and San Francisco and found that pedestrians tend to choose paths, called ‘directional paths’, which seem to point directly to their destination even if they may eventually be longer than the ‘shortest path’. Paolo Santi, research director of Cnr-Iit, points out that “this strategy, known as vector navigation, has been observed in previous studies carried out on animals, from insects to primates. Vector navigation is used because it requires fewer brain resources than having to calculate the so-called shortest path. This brain energy saving could be the result of evolution, so as to leave the brain more resources to perform other activities for survival. ” In short, the mind distributes the energies between the different computing activities. “There seems to be a mechanism that allocates the computational resources of the brain for other uses: thirty thousand years ago, for example, to escape from a predator and today to avoid a dangerous area due to excessive traffic” says Carlo Ratti, professor of urban technologies at the urban studies and planning department of MIT and director of the Senseable City Lab. Alessandro Rizzo, professor of automation and robotics at the electronics and telecommunications department of the Turin Polytechnic, explains that “vector navigation does not produce the shortest path, but a route sufficiently close to the minimum, easier to calculate and therefore with a lower expenditure of brain energy “. The results of the study could then be used for urban planning. “The potential contained in the travel data of individuals is enormous. Having identified uniform behavioral characteristics in cities with such different characteristics – highlights Rizzo – gives us good hope in the possibility of using these data to better design the cities of the future, making the movement of citizens more effective, safe and, why not, pleasant “. Contributed to the study by Christian Bongiorno (first signatory), associate professor at the Université Paris-Saclay, Alessandro Rizzo, professor of automation and robotics at the Department of electronics and telecommunications of the Polytechnic of Turin, and Joshua Tenenbaum, professor of computational sciences and cognitive at the Center for the Study of the Brain, Mind, and Machines of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Science.