Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 November 1893 — A PSYCHOLOGICAL PUZZLE. [ARTICLE]

A PSYCHOLOGICAL PUZZLE.

Carelessness In Cool-Headed Men Lead ing to Costly Blunders. Here is a psychological puzzle for the experts. What made that brakeman on the Wabash line turn the switch and let the express train plunge in to the waiting freight which stood on the siding? The accounts of the disaster all agree that Thompson, the brakeman. was a man of experience in railroading, “a trusted man. and of more than ordinary intelligence,” says the Associatd Press dispatch. His experience had included recent repetitions of the same conditions which existed on the fatal night. He had frequently stopped at the same siding to let the same train go by, very often in two sections, and never before had failed in his duty. The night of the wreck he knew that the express was in two sections; he let the first section by, and then opened the switch with the second section almost in sight. Why did he do it? Not to wreck the traiu and kill tb& passengers. His mind wandered for a moment, he forgot his duty, forgot where he was and what he was doing, and before he came to himself the mishap was done. The mystery is that this mental failure should come at such a. time, when all the conditions conspire to produce unusual elertness. Any one oan tecall a multitude of suoh instances, some of them in his own experience. We have all known of coolheaded, vigilant men who have made costly blunders in the familiar routine of their duties—blunders which were unexplainable by any ordinary relation of cause and effect. Business men whose shrewdness and foresight unaccountably desert them, athletes whose coolness and skill depart wben in the performance of a familiar feat, cautious hunters whose care in handling their guns is proverbial, who forget all this care in an instant, and other instances innumerable. It is. not so many years ago that such a contradiction of habitual caution oost a young business man, with a promising career before him, his life at a railroad crossing. He had crossed the track at that crossing and at that hour times without number. He knew that a train passed at this time, nearly always met it and waited to allow it to pass, but the night of his death he stepped on the track with the train almost upon him and was killed. The sentinels of his brain, which always until then had warned him of danger, were apparently off duty that evening. Carelessness is hardly a complete explanation of these lapses, for there is tho carelessness itself to be accounted for. Why were these men who had never been careless before careless just at this fatal moment? Men are not prone tocarelessness when they know, as that Wabash brakeman must have known, the probable consequences of neglect. Forgetfulness is a poor explanation, and itself needs to be explained. For what is it that sends men’s wits wool gathering when most needed at home to superintend an accustomed task? Does our mental machinery suddenly fail at these times and leave our consciousness empty of impressions of outside things and ourselves oblivious of our surroundings? Let somebody wiser than we answer.— [New York World.