SLOWER REACTION TIME.

White Ribbon, Volume 33, Issue 381, 18 April 1927, Page 15

SLOWER REACTION TIME.

“It is the proven fact that alcohol lengthens the simple reaction time and still more does it lengthen the reaction time when factors of discrimination or j jdgmeat are involved. The classical experiments are those of the world-famous Professor Kraepelin. Towards 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 ‘wry otherwise.’ Always the speed and accuvacy 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. Similarly the batsmen, after lunch, even with a very little alcohol in his brain, reacts more slowly, mistimes a yorker for a half-volley, or thinks he can carry the boundary and hits the ball into the hands of the outfield. “Cricket is the king of games, but only a game; and if you spoil your play by this means or that you drop out of the side, sooner or later. Driving a motor-car on a public road is not a game, though many think it no more. The good driver is he who has a quick reaction time, with keen discrimination and good judgment—not least of the speed of moving objects, as v r hen one is playing cricket or tennis. It is absolutely certain, beyond all question, that alcohol impairs these qualities. In what doses? It begins to do so at once and in some degree even in doses so small that no one would trouble to drink them except for experimental purposes. Lives and limbs are thus lost, all over the world, in large and rapidly increasing numbers, every day in the year. Is the driver, in these cases, drunk? Often he is drv.nk according to the criteria applied at Present, and likely to be accepted or proposed by the new Committee. Often he Is not drunk according to any criteria which are likely to be proposed or accepted by public opinion- -that ‘chaos of prejudices,* as Huxley called it long ago in another connection. But it w*as the alcohol In his brain that cost the

few hundredths of a second in putting on the brake, or turning the steering wheel; or that made him think he could get through a gap when he could not; or that permitted the fatal speed of travel which his sober judgment would have rightly feared. Was he drunk? Evidently the question, as it stands, is meaningless and impossible. Was he intoxicated? Yes, as surely as, and far more disastrously than, if he had been dead drunk in the tonneau and being conveyed home by a sober driver. — From the “London Spectator.”