Evening star., 1938-08-19
SIZE BLINDNESS
FOUND COMMON
British Scientific Body Is
Told 1t May Be Factor
in Auto Accidents.
BY THOMAS r.. HENRY,
Star Stan Correspondent.


Star Stan Correspondent.
CAMBRIDGE, England, Aug. ls.-
Size and shape blindness, possibly re-
lated to color blindness and hitherto
unrecognized factors in automobile &C.
cidents, were described before the Brit
ish Association for the Advancement
OF Science here today by DR.. r. H
Thouless, professor Of psychology at
the University of Glasgow.
According to the laws of optics, DR..
T'houless explained, the farther away
an object the smaller it should appear.
Actually, he found in q long series OF
experiments, this actually holds true
for only few individuals, within mod
crate distances. Something happens
In the brain, the nature of which is
as yet unknown, which nullifies optical
laws so that the object appears in ap-
proximately its real dimensions. This
newly discovered phenomenon DR..
Thouless has called phenomenal re-
For a very few of the students he
studied there seems to be no brain
compensation for distance, so that OBJ
jects actually do grow smaller, and in
about per cent Of his cases he found
inverse phenomenal repression" a
condition in which the brain goes too
far in its effort to restore the balance
so that the farther away an object
relatively the larger it seems.
Augmented by Fatigue.
This strange condition seems to be
augmented, he said, by either fatigue
or alcohol. and reduced by coffee. A
high degree of phenomenal repression
in which the brain restores objects to
their normal size, he stressed, may be
an almost indispensable quality in a
successful automobile driver
Such man, he said, sees a gap
in traffic in something near its real
size before he drives up to it, whereas
the person with low phenomenal re-
gression sees it from a distance as
smaller than it really is. Each
must make judgment as to the real
size of the gap. The person with low
phenomenal repression has a much
larger gap to bridge by means of judg-
ment between appearance and reality.
Judgment being slower and more un-
certain process than perception, he
may be expected to drive through gaps
with more difficulty and less certainty
than the individual who can trust to
his immediate impression of size"
Defect Is in Brain.
DR.. Thouless found two cases of in
verse phenomenal repression in ex-
animation of 200 subjects. In all cases
1t remained after all defects in the
eyes themselves had been remedied
with glasses, proving almost certainly
that the defect is located somewhere
within the brain. Such a person, he
said, is a particularly dangerous auto
mobile driver He always sees holes
in the traffic ahead of him bigger
than they actually are and does not
hesitate the drive into them
His only preliminary and incon-
elusive experiments on the effects OF
alcohol and other drugs, indicate they
may produce this phenomenon of
space distortion in otherwise normal
persons, he said Alcohol is a brain
depressant like fatigue, he said, and
cited weird experience of his own
In driving while very tired.
THE road seemed to narrow almost
to point in front of me, he said.
II seemed to be driving into funnel
There was an almost irresistible i'm
pulse to drive in the center of the
road. This is a common fault of
many drivers. 1t may be character
istic of an individual with low phe-
nomenal repression. I had to stop
my car and get out"
Seen Protective Mechanism.
The newly discovered phenomenon
may also be a factor, he said, in men,
tai cases which puzzle psychiatrists,
such as those of persons suffering
from extreme and unreasonable ter
ror With inadequate capacity to make
mental adjustments of vision a dog
approaching person might look as
oAS oIo tSiAiA Al6 do q lloLl, All tdCb,
he said, phenomenal repression may
have been developed in the human
mind by evolution through the ages
as protective mechanism against
this sort of extreme fear.
Like color-blind person, he said,
the victim of abnormal phenomenal
repression" never knows of the defect
unless it is brought to his attention
by psychologist. His tests on Glas-
gov students showed a very similar
mental adjustment taking place in the
perception of shapes and colors OF OBJ
jects at various distances. The more
exact the experiments can be made
the more it becomes certain that no
two persons actually see the same
sort OF world around them.
Recent German experiments, he
pointed out, strongly indicate that this
phenomenon, unrecognized up to the
present, is very deep-seated in the
history Of the race and is found at
least in the higher apes.