NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1927. THE HUMAN FACTOR

Northern Advocate, 24 September 1927, Page 6

NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1927. THE HUMAN FACTOR

Registered for transmission tlirough the post as a newspaper.

Increasing attention is being bestowed on the psychical side of human life. In keeping with this characteristic were the remarks of Dr Ramsay Smith when presiding as coroner at an inquiry into a level crossing fatality. This -was an apparently inexplicable case of a motorist attempting to cross a railway line heedless of the possibility of a train passing at any moment, and paying with his life for his rashness. The deceased was a careful driver, and had used the crossing frequently, and must, as the coroner suggested, have been aware of the regulation enjoining caution. Yet somehow, and perhaps not for the first time, he treated them as negligible. What could Dr. Ramsay Smith have done but regard this as one ■ of the many accidents to be ascribed to the “human factor? }> The hapless victim had become a prey to a momentary forgetfulness. And the coroner quoted statistics to show that it is through mental aberrations of one kind or another that the vast majority of mishaps in factories occur. Are not we all, even the most alert of us, liable to fits of abstraction? And is not human fallibility largely the result of the mechanical way in which many of opr actions are performed? Assuming, as we may fairly do, that the decease! was betrayed by habit into a lapse of consciousness, his action in attempting to cross a railway line in front of a train is an instance of the same kind of automatic cerebration as that under which we perform such familiar functions as posting a letter or locking a door. Except for its tragic consequences, this failure to observe the proscribed formalities about traversing level crossings is no more inexplicable than dating a letter with the name of a month or the number of a year for some time after it has run its course. What we are to deduce from it all, it is difficult to say, for, as a writer in the “Adelaide remarks, it is easier io recognise the existense of automatic brain action involving danger, thpn to suggest a cure. It would

almost seem as though the capacity

acquired by habit to perform many of our actions automatically were Nature’s way of relieving an overburdened consciousness. The * ‘ Register ” goes on to say that we are in the same pass with regard to the phenomenon the psychologists call the si imperative idea,” or the -over-mastering impulse. The small oddities of behaviour from which most of us more or less suffer led Voltaire to say that if the planets are inhabited the earth must seem to their denizens the madhouse of the universe. All men are mad, says Horace in one of his satires. It is a matter of degree. Dr. Johnson Avas not mad because he counted the posts in Fleet Street, and picked up stray pieces of orange peel. But the lady Avho unlawfully appropriates the ribbons or cottons she sees on the haberdasher’s counter is likely to find herself in trouble, unless a plea of kleptomania a\’ails. The world havdng no guidance in the matter is left to grade eccentricities by results. An uncontrollable impulse to stick a knife into a fellowman secures for its possessor confinement in a gaol or a mental hospital, but an impulse equally uncontrollable to backbite or ridicule has to be tolerated so far as the law is concerned. The sanest are liable to emotions they are powerless to struggle with. The actor, Charles Matthews, delevoped an unconquerable aA r ersion to the thought o i mustard and mutton going together/ and when he suav the unholy union consummated on the plate of a fellow-diner at a restaurant, he dragged the plate away and emptied mutton and all on the floor. There is no weapon but self-control to combat these mysterious impulses; and as for “automotism,” the only remedy lies in the cultivation of the faculty of attention. Wsys have been suggested bv which the tendency to perform familiar acts unconsciously may be corrected. Where the act is one of some importance, such as locking the door of a room or safe, or cupboard, the mind may be recalled to itself eithei by the performance of the act three or four times over, or by the utterance aloud of Avords indicating that the act has been done.