PROHIBITION COLUMN

Evening Star, Issue 19442, 28 December 1926, Page 9

PROHIBITION COLUMN

(Published by arrangement with She "United Temperance Reform Council.)

The London ‘ Times ’ concluded a leading article on drunkenness in relation to motor accidents in these terms;—“As things stand at present there would appear to Ire no absolute safeguard for tho motor driver but total abstinence.” ALCOHOL AND THE MOTOR CAR. [By C. AV. Sammy, M.D., F.Z.S., F.R.S.E.] PART 1. TESTS FOR DRUNKENNESS. To devise perfect “tests for drunkenness” will be found impossible; man is too complex, and men are too various, for that problem to be really soluble; but we can do better than supply the police and their doctors with means of testing the sobriety of the driver of a motor car, for instance, after an accident; we can state the scientific facts which teach us how to prevent altogether the accidents, St present innumerable, which are due to alcohol. Every day, all the world over, more and more men and women are assuming the control of powerful engines upon the public roads, and every day the number of lives and limbs lost in accidents caused thereby rises; nor is the end by any means yet. No one can qeustion that the true and exact relation of alcohol to this new fact of the modern life of man is a matter of the first importance. ACCURACY OF JUDGMENT. Here life and death depend upon two factors—speed of response and accuracy of judgment. How does alcohol affect these vital, mortal matters? We know, and know exactly, unquestionably, in principle and detail, and our knowledge has been tested in many ways and in many countries during several past decades. The students of the nervous system long ago devised means of'mcasuring what is called reaction time. Electric signals’are used, and an electrically-controlled clock, having a single hand which revolves over the dial in one second, divided into hundredths by the markings upon tho dial. When the subject of the experiment is being tested we, for instance, show him an object, and ask him to move a switch with his fingers as soon as he sees it. The feat may take about the third of a second—say, thirty or forty hundredths as recorded on the dial, where the hand begins to move when the object is shown and is arrested by the act of response. Knowing the behaviour of nerve fibres, we can prove by appropriate means that nil but a tiny fraction of this time is taken in the brain. The nerves are merely conductors, and their rate of conduction is extremely fast and extremely constant. It is the behaviour of tho nerve ceils concerned in sensation and volition that really matters. When discrimination and judgment are introduced into the experiment—as in asking an engine-driver to move one switch if he sees a red object, but another is he sees a green—we are no longer studying “ simple reaction time,” but “ complex reaction time,” a far more protracted affair, involving new factors, susceptible to many influences.

SPEED AND ACCURACY IMPAIRED.

Recently, discussing this subject elsewhere, I wrote the following summary of the findings, upon which I cannot improve;—

“ Alcohol lengthens the simple reaction time, and far more does it lengthen the reactfon time when factors of discrimination or judgment arc involved. The classical experiments are those of the world-famous Professor Kraopelin. Toward*, the end of the nineteenth century he studied the matter. He was, like the overwhelming majority of doctors at that date, a believer in alcohol as a ‘ stimulant ’ and ‘ tonic’ and so forth. He found the facts very otherwise! Always the speed and accuracy of response are impaired by alcohol; but the most remarkable fact of all is that the subject of the experiment imagines himself to be doing better than usual. The cold clock, the "judgment of which is uninfluenced by ‘ the mocker,’ knows and shows the truth.”