CHAPTER V. 



EFFECT OF ALCOHOL ON THE PROCESS OF MEMORIZING. 



There have been no complete systematic investigations of the effect 

 of alcohol on the memory. Only a few of its many phases have been 

 studied, and these have been selected apparently at random. The 

 relatively inaccessible work of Vogt 1 seems to be the only extensive study 

 of the effect of alcohol on the ability to learn logical material in metrical 

 form. The pioneer work of Kraepelin 2 and the later work of the 

 Kraepelin school is based on the continuous memorizing of series of 

 numbers. But since number memory and poetry memory are special 

 forms with their own peculiar laws, our knowledge of the effect of 

 alcohol on the memorizing process is still very incomplete. Possibly 

 this is because all the classical techniques make such demands on the 

 intelligent cooperation of the subject that they are poorly adapted for 

 alcohol experiments. Whatever the cause, lack of investigation of 

 the changes in memory that are affected by alcohol is one of the most 

 conspicuous deficiencies in our knowledge of the effect of alcohol on the 

 neural tissue. This deficiency is the more striking because, in any 

 psychological view of normal life, memory is a fundamental psycho- 

 physical process. It is the more embarrassing because quantitative 

 objective techniques for measuring changes in memory are so rare. 



The classical method that seemed to us likely to make the least 

 demands on the active cooperation of the subject was the memory-span 

 method that in many hands has proved so valuable an indication of 

 individual differences. But we found in preliminary trials that when 

 given in sufficient number to yield data for satisfactory statistical 

 treatment, even the memory-span experiments seem exacting, tedious, 

 and often repulsive to the average subject. Besides this, they seem to 

 be subject to enormous practice effect, as well as an indefinite number 

 of unknown subjective and objective conditions that, in view of the 

 principles of this research, completely disqualified them for our use. 



The memory-span method, like most of the many recent methods for 

 testing the memory process, has been developed as a short cut to the 

 Ebbinghaus 3 method of complete memorization. The latter is yet the 

 standard method, but it is enormously time-consuming, tedious, and 

 fatiguing. It is impractical for untrained subjects. In such studies as 

 ours some short cut is essential if memory measurements are to be 

 included at all. The underlying principles of the short cut that we 



l Vogt, Norsk Magazin f. Laegevidenskaben, 1910, 8, p. 605. 



'Kraepelin, Ueber die Beeinflussung einfacher psychischer Vorgiinge durch einige Arzneimittel, 

 Jena, 1892. 



'Ebbinghaus, Ueber das Gedachtnis, Leipsic, 1885. 



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