Photo by Rolenz

Washington D.C. metro riders may be familiar with a common annoyance–emerging from the train only to find that one of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s 589 escalators is waiting for them at a stand still; a last, small mountain to climb on their way home from work.

This makes District commuters all to familiar with the drunk feeling one gets when he steps onto a static escalator. The sensation is produced by a disconnect between the brain’s awareness of the fact that the escalator is stopped and the motor skills associated with stepping on to a moving staircase, according to Japanese psychologists who studied this exact phenomenon.

The research of Takao Fukui and his colleagues in their 2007 paper entitled “Odd Sensation Induced by Moving-Phantom which Triggers Subconscious Motor Program” document this phenomenon, which may be exacerbated by actual drunkeness brought on by green beer.