HUMANS LOVE SPINNING, AND RESEARCHERS WANT TO KNOW WHY
ONE THEORY IS THAT THE DESIRE FOR DIZZINESS ORIGINATED IN A COMMON APE ANCESTOR.
IF YOU REGULARLY ignored a playground’s monkey bars, seesaw, and slide, and instead made a beeline straight for the merry-go-round, you’re likely familiar with the intoxicatingly dizzy feeling that accompanies a good spin session.
The light-headedness may come with a touch of vertigo, causing the world to tilt around you, or even bring on feelings of sudden elation. In Turkey, practitioners of Sufism known as whirling dervishes take advantage of these effects, twirling as they dance as a form of meditation and to induce spiritual experiences. Others undergo extensive
training to suppress dizziness while spinning: Professional ballet dancers, for example, complete countless pirouettes with ease, while circus performers often dangle gracefully from ropes dozens of feet in the air.
There’s no doubt that humans have found many creative ways to incorporate spinning into our everyday lives. But at what point in our evolutionary history did we begin spinning specifically to induce that altered mental state — and what purpose does it serve?
WHEN A PERSON twists and twirls, the fluid inside their inner ears is moving, too. What’s more, the fluid continues to move — bumping into minuscule hair cells and sending messages to the brain — even after the rest of the body comes to a stop.
This miscommunication between brain and body is typically what causes that dizzy feeling, and can even bring on physiological “highs” at high enough speeds. (So go ahead, take a few extra turns in your office computer chair when no one is watching!) Other benefits, particularly for autistic people, include the abilities to increase or reduce sensory stimuli, according to the British National Autistic Society.
Disrupting the vestibular system with some lighthearted swirling can be helpful for others, too. Adriano Lameira, a primatologist and evolutionary psychologist at
the University of Warwick in England, says spinning and similar forms of play are commonly believed to help children sharpen their proprioception (the body’s ability to sense movement and position, location and action), as well as monitor unconscious physiological mechanisms like breathing and digestion.
“For [other] highly intelligent animals,” he adds, “we could expect similar advantages associated with the exploration of their ‘inner landscapes.’ ”
IN A RECENT study, Lameira dug into whether other highly intelligent animals — namely, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos — also twirl to induce altered mental states. Along with fellow researcher Marcus Perlman, he published a paper in 2023 on the prevalence of spinning in these primates, our evolutionary cousins — and what the behavior may reveal about humans.
Essentially, the scientists suggest, if other great apes are also big fans of spinning round and round, it’s safe to assume our desires for dizziness originated in a distant, common ancestor. “Whether altered state experiences within the hominid family shaped the emergence and evolution of the modern human mind remains one of the major and most thoughtprovoking unknowns in cognitive science,” the authors write.
For the study, the researchers focused specifically on videos of primates hanging on to the bottoms of ropes or vines while twirling through the air. “Being suspended, this allowed great apes to achieve faster spinning revolutions and longer spinning time,” Lameira explains. They reported that the apes spun at an average rotational velocity of 1.43 revolutions per second. (Though, in the case of one daredevil, the fastest sustained rotational speed clocked in at an impressive 3.3 revolutions per second.)
After letting go, they tended to topple over before returning for another few rounds. “This is perhaps the most solid evidence that great apes are experiencing similar physiological highs as humans [do] during and after spinning,” Lameira says.
As it turns out, there’s good supporting evidence at play: Great ape inner ear anatomy is comparable to humans,’ meaning they likely feel similar effects. “Indeed, it is the most similar among any living nonhuman primate or nonhuman animal, including overall size,” Lameira says, which helps explain why our primate cousins have a penchant for spinning just like we do.
Spinning is believed to help children sharpen their ability to sense movement and position, location and action.