Turning to the practical consequent ces of his subject, Dr. Thouless said a person of high phenomenal regression might be expected to drive a car more easily through trate than one with low. He saw a gap in the traffic in something near its real size before he drove up to it, whereas the person with low phenomenal regression saw it as smaller than it really was when it was at a distance.
Some individuals showed the odd peculiarity of seeing objects as larger when they went farther from the eyes. The rarity of this condition might seem to make it of little practical interest, but it might be of considerable importance in motor driving. One of his two subjects did drive a car, but admitted. having smashed a wing in getting through gate. The other had found himself unable to learn to drive because he drove into gaps where he had ne room to pass.
An indication be had obtained was that, as might be expected, alcohol decreased phenomenal regressior while caffeine increased it. He thought that it might be worth while for those investigating the effect of alcohol on motor driving to conside" the possibility of disturbance of spatial perception as well as of speed of motor responses. A persistent tendency to drive on the crown of the road was a common fault of many drivers. He suggested that it might be a fault characteristic of an in dividual with low phenomenal regress sion, and that if that were prove to be its origin an understanding by the driver of the cause of his fault would put him in the way of correcting it. object.
We are often told that the camera cannot lie. It all depends what we mean by lying. A photograph of the ellipse from the angle at which we see it as a circle would show it as a transversely flattened ellipse.
Dr. Thouless then enumerated a number of considerations which made it impossible to believe that this effect was due to judgment, and forced upon us the certainty that it depended on an integral part of our machinery for vision—a part played by the brain, not by the eye or optic nerve. One very curious fact is that in rare individuals, perhaps one per cent. of the population, the effect is reversed, at any rate as regards size. To such' people the apparent size of an object, instead of decreasing with distance, actually increases.
The brain acts on the information provided by the sense-organs to give us a perception. It may fill up gaps or modify the sensory image of a particular object to fit in with other information about other objects—for instance, by making a distant object look bigger than it ought to on the basis of pure sensory image because of the information received from other objects, that it is distant. This ow, in Professor Thouless's words regards the mind (or the brain acting to some extent as a unitary Short list of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.