Revered by the ancient Greeks, essential to Islamic art, and venerated in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, circles are a universal shape. No matter where you begin, there are really only two ways to draw a circle, a single stroke heading clockwise, or a single stroke heading counterclockwise.

The folks at Quartz have analyzed 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts. Americans tend to draw circles counterclockwise. Japanese tend to draw circles in the opposite direction. Why is that? Using a dataset from a Google online game called Quick, Draw!, 119,000 unique circles drawn by people in 148 countries were examined to identify the circle-drawing directions favored by different nations. Read the interesting analysis of drawing and handwriting in this article.

image: Circular logic. (Quartz/Nikhil Sonnad)