Evening Star Newspaper, November 17, 1929, Page 99

C., NOVEMBER 17, 1929. THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, . Science Studies the If You Simply Can’t R esist the Temptation e = to See How Many Stories Make a Sky- scraper, How Many Telegraph Poles to a Mile, Or Solve Any of a Thousand-and- One Other Similar Stunts in Simple Mental Arithmetic, Then You Are In- dulging in a Harmless Hobby Common to Fifty-Four Per Cent of the Human Race. BY EMILY C. DAVIS. O you count fence posts as you walk along the streets? Can you report precisely how many steps you take when you walk home from work? Do you find yourself counting the cars of a passing freight train or the automobiles that whiz .by as you drive down the road? If you do any of these mental arithmetic stunts, or any one of a hundred other similar omes, you are using your brain in a manner that is highly popular with the human race —much more popular than has heretofore been supposed, for up until now nobody has taken the time to count the people who have the counting habit. * A psychologist who apparently likes count- fng things himself has at last gathered statistics on the number of students at his university who have what he calls “arithmo-thymic in- clinations.” His discovery is that more than half of these young people count one thing eor another. It may be books on library bookshelves, motifs in wall paper patterns, buttons on clothing, steps from one landing to another in university buildings, letters in the words on signboards, houses on each block in the town. A complete list of the objects that are found suitable for such counting would be long and varied. The students who were questioned are at the far-away University of Poznan, in Poland. But it is safe to say that their mental habits are fairly typical of human beings anywhere, and not merely college-age humans either. The Polish professor, Stefan Blachowski, first presented his discovery that counting objects is a prevalent occupation at the International Congress of Psychology held recently at Yale. His address provoked lively discussion among his fellow psychologists. And wherever the Polish professor's experiments entered into a conversation, a surprising number of Americans femarked, “Why, I count that way, too.” Women are more inclined to the counting habit than men, Prof. Blachowski explained. Among 96 college students evenly divided as to sex, he found that 67 per cent of the women had the habit, as compared with only 44 per cent of the men. He made a retest, using 71 new students, and again women were the chief counters. This slant on the feminine mind is unex- pected, considering the popular belief that women are inclined to shy from figures. If we look into the matter more closely, however, we can see that the popular belief is not necessarily discredited. For being addicted to arithmo-thymia is very different from having a mathematical turn of mind. The individual who counts the people opposite in a face-to- face street car is not really juggling with any principle of arithmetic beyond the first les- sons in first-grade addition. The mental effort of adding one to 23 is not to be compared with the mental effort of making a bank account balance. The psychologist’s figures show that some of the students count only one sort of object. Others are more liberal in their interest. One student made a remark which the psychologist regards as typical: . “If I see something in a row, pictures upon the wall, for instance, I count them.” . Another student said: “I always count the stations during railway journeys. Perhaps I do #0 because I always describe my journey in detail. I count the houses and jot down my precise observations in my diary.” The experiences of the students show that the counting habit occurs with very different degrees of distinctness and force among nor- mal people. If you are an arithmo-thymic, it may mean that once in a while you set yourself some task as counting the number -of brown coats on the street, because it pops into your mind that an extraordinary number of brown-clad people are in sight. Or, you may count steps as you walk, because your sense of precision pesters you to find out how many steps you have to take to reach a given point, or because, like Sherlock Holmes, you believe in close at- Freight car counting, too, is harmless, unless you start trying mental addition on the numbers. tention to details of this sort. You may re- member that he advised his friend Watson to ascertain the number of steps in their lodging house. The author Swift amused himself in this fashion and in his “Diary of Stella,” written in 1711, he states: “I leave my best gown and periwig at Mrs, Vanhomrigh's, then walk up the Pall Mall, through the park, out at Buckingham House and so to Chelsea, a little beyond the church. I set out about sunset and get there in something less than an hour: it is 2 good miles, and just 5,748 steps.” But supposs you become so accustomed to counting steps that it is a regular part of your daily routine. You omit the counting process one morning, and an unpleasant sense of in- completeness lurks in the back of your head. In the course of the day's work an order is balled up, and your brain switchboard flashes instantly a connection between the office diffi- culties and the failure to start the day accord- ing to custom. Superstition, luck, fear—when these insidiously link themselves with the count- ing habit, the inclination to count may soon shade over into a compulsion. Even then the person may be captain of his fate. That is, his counting impulse may not interfere with his daily life any more than a superstitious belief that events may be ex- pected to go in series of threes, for good or evil. But if a counting compulsion is so powerful that an individual does not dare to act con- trary to it, then he is a victim of paralyzed will, and he is eligible for the doubtfully de- sirable title of being an arithmo-manic. In the past, psychologists have thought of the counting habit as being abnormal, because many patients suffering from mental disease are slaves to a mania for counting. Patients with this compulsion to count long ago attracted the interest of science because their symptoms werg conspicuous., Prof. Blachowski pointed out that here, as in other domains, science at first occupies itself with extreme cases, and for a long time it escaped observation that arithmo-mania is merely an abnormal variation of the common impulse to count. 5 Thirty years ago a French scientist—Gine- stoux—reported to a society of anatomists and physiologists the strange case of a young man who counted every leiter in every phrase that came to his attention. This young man -7 “Counting sheep,” one of the: worlds oldest insomnia cures, is based upon what science now believes is an effort to forget the workaday world in con- ¢ontration upon meaningless numbers. dhunted the letters in each sentence that he sEoke, read, heard, wrote or thought. He had t4, he explained. The counting began when b* awoke in the morning and was kept up until h#', fell asleep at night. If any sentence was sfoken to him, he could immediately announce tr!n number of letters it contained. aHe had been at this incessant mental occu- phtion since the age of 10, but he told the sci- eizist who investigated his case that he found h# habit no great burden. It did not prevent h¥n from holding a conversation, reading a bdbk, nor from making a living at a profession. zsle was a placid and intelligent young man; ix spite of his arithmo-mania, and that is the n’xlly vemarkable part of his case. For most irflividizals who become saddled with the count- lnE habit to the extent of incessant counting ar® no longer useful or contented members of iety. eedless to say, an individual is not likely succumb to a counting mania unless his ntal health is in a precarious state from cther causes. When Prof. Blachowski’s report wis discussed at the International Congress of P#chology, Dr. Leonard Seif of Munich arose to suggest that mental patients who cannot redist counting are using this device in order tojascape from the responsibilities of life. The nefirotic wishes to escape from the tasks that !mée him. His relations with other people have berome disturbed in some way, and so when he hi to face responsibility or a task, he does sor’iething else, usually something useless, such' as,lcoumlng, in order to evade his duty. “iOne of these cases,” the German psychig- tri%t explained, “is a lady who wants to be a ician, though this workaday planet is mot arrhnged for magicians, “She has a magic number 13, and it is a wolderful number. It makes life work pleas- anitly for her. One day she fails in what she wishes to do, and the day is the 13th. Then' L) Continued on Seventh Page If you are an arithmo-thymic, you may have considerable pleasure with a picket fence and an umbrella.