Note the featureless horizon. It's pretty featureless. (Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

The Inuit (you may know and love them as Eskimos, though that’s generally considered derogatory expression that suggests Inuit-speaking peoples are base eaters of raw flesh) suffer from a panic disorder peculiar to them called kayak angst. Essentially, walrus hunters indigenous to the Arctic spend days at a time, alone and adrift in calm northern waters searching for prey.This can get a bit isolating and it freaks the Inuit out.

First, understand the landscape surrounding the hunters in their kayaks (it’s called cultural relativism, jerk). Imagine a vast ocean, with ice drifts and no land in sight. There you have it. That’s about it. Walrus don’t always hug land, and like my dad always said, “Son, if you ever hunt walrus in the Arctic in a one-man kayak, you gotta go where the walrus are. Remember that. “

I will remember, Dad. I will.

So there’s nothing around, no reference point. And as Chuck and I were saying on the webcast today, CNN covered a study that shows we humans tend to go in circles when we don’t have a reference point. Like land, for example.

The study participants were dropped off in the Sahara and a forest in Germany and told to walk thatta way to camp. Without a reference point, the sun in the case of the study, the researchers found people tend to walk in a large circle over time. We zig or zag and after a while, enough zigs add up and we’ve made a circle, despite a belief that we’re walking in a straight line.

The Inuit-speaking peoples demonstrate what appears to be a fundamental terror of our poor innate navigational skills. Back in the one-person kayak, surrounded by a wholly featureless horizon for long periods of time, a hunter can really get a bit worried he’ll be lost forever. Let’s face it: You get lost in your kayak in the Arctic Ocean, you’re pretty much hosed.

This, friends, is kayak angst; the fear of becoming lost adrift in the ocean. This primarily takes place in the summer, when the walrus huntin’s good and there’s such a thing as open water instead of just ice. During the Arctic summer, the sun tends to stay out all day, which lends itself to unusual sleep patterns. So you find yourself waking up suddenly and you have no idea how long you’ve been asleep or, by proxy, how much you’ve drifted. Kayak angst.

That’s all I was saying before we were cut off on the webcast today.

More on HowStuffWorks.com:
How PTSD Works
How Kayaking Works (this here’s a Chuck article)
How Sleep Works