Scientists: tall people better estimate distances than short people – RIA Novosti

MOSCOW, September 1 – RIA Novosti . Chinese scientists have made a surprising discovery – they found that tall people are able to better determine the distance to close us of subjects even when they are sitting, and low people – are, according to an article published in the journal Science Advances

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More recently, scientists have begun to be interested in how high or low the height of its influence on health, mental abilities and physical skills. For example, in 2011, they found that the higher a woman more likely to suffer from cancer, and high politics – increasingly becoming the chosen than people low. In addition, molecular biologists have discovered a number of genes that determine human growth and associated with a predisposition to various diseases.

Liu Zhou (Liu Zhou) from the University of East China in Shanghai and his colleagues have uncovered another unusual distinction in the body at high and low people, watching as several volunteers have tried to determine the distance to the ball ping-pong table, which scientists hung on a string a few meters from their heads.

Periodically, scientists changed the lighting in the room, muffling including light or red or blue LEDs to complicate the task, or even turning off the light and including a couple of seconds before the participant of the experiment was to determine the distance to the ball.

In analyzing the results of these experiments, Zhou and his colleagues met with an unusual thing – it turned out that for sufficiently large distances greater than three meters tall people coped with this task much better than low participants in the experiment. Interestingly, the gap existed, albeit in a less pronounced form, even when scientists or seated tall people on chairs, or made shorties get up on a chair.

With what may be due to an unusual distinction between people different heights, and why it persists even when their growth is equalized? As scientists believe, like “superzrenie” in tall people is the product of evolution and one of the reasons why the average height of a man is constantly growing with the development of our species.

The fact that our eyes perceive the environment are not in three dimensions, as we imagine, but in the form of two flat “images” that are processed by our brain and are in a kind of 3D-images, the distance to the objects on which you can easily and unambiguously be calculated.

Due to the high depth of view is not enough, the exact calculation of the distance to this three-dimensional image is possible only for small distances, about 1-2 meters, and in the more distant distances, our brain begins to “cheat” by calculating the distance of on the real picture, and using, depends on the individual growth of data and experience accumulated during a person’s lifetime, internal “local map”, and statistical calculations.

The quality of the cards and payments, according to Zhou and his colleagues – higher than our eyes are located, the greater the angle between the line of sight and the observed object, and the distortions will be smaller when determining the distance. This, according to scientists, may explain why people become higher in the evolution – sharp vision in more individuals of our ancestors helped them better to find food and avoid danger, especially at night

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