The actual reason is down to inputted energy. It won't happen if you lay your headphones down in a straight line on your desk and don't touch them.
It will happen though, if you fold them neatly and put them in your pocket. The reason lies in entropy. When you have a system (headphone cables) with many possible states and then you input energy to scramble the current system, it is far more likely that the resulting system will seem disordered. Walking around inputs energy to the cable in your pocket.

This is because there are far more potential disordered states than order states and when you move around, thus inputting energy and therefore movement into the system, it's statistically improbable that you'll end up with a neat system, let alone the precise system you left it in.

"Brownian motion" was tongue in cheek.
( Kroney, Tue 23 Aug 2011, 15:01, 1 reply, 15 years ago)

isn't that entropy rather than chaos theory?

( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Tue 23 Aug 2011, 15:11, Reply)

Honestly, I'm not sure. As I understand it, entropy describes thermodynamics
whereas chaos theory describes the apparently random movements of matter based on existant but not observable causes.

You're probably right, I shall correct it.
( Kroney, Tue 23 Aug 2011, 15:13, Reply)

I think entropy can be other stuff to
it's used in communication studies, too, to describe trnasfer of information or something, but I think that's more metaphorical
( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Tue 23 Aug 2011, 15:15, Reply)