Here’s something you’ll certainly want to try when you get home from work. Take your shoes off, lay on the bed, close your eyes, and have a loved one touch your toes one at a time in more or less random order. Can you identify which toe is being touched? You’ll be forgiven if you make mistakes, because most people do. When this experiment was done at the University of Oxford, none of the subjects could name the touched toes perfectly.
In similar experiments performed in the past with fingers, people were able to identify the digit being prodded correctly 99 percent of the time. In this new set of experiments, that figure fell to 94 percent for big and little toes.
But the ones in the middle? It was just 57, 60 and 79 percent for the second, third and fourth toe respectively. Perhaps most amazingly, not a single participant was able to identify which of their toes was being prodded 100 percent of the time and some people could only get the right answer 20 percent of time. The results are published in the journal Perception.
These intriguing results bring up more questions than they answer. Would people who go barefoot every day do better? How about people with no arms who use their feet for things the rest of us use our hands for? Or ballet dancers? Or apes (if they could communicate their answers to researchers)? One thing is for sure- people will go out of their way to be the first to score 100%, even if it’s only in the privacy of their homes.
(Image credit: Flickr user Basheer Tome)