The study of fatigue / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1925?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The study of fatigue / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/18 (page 323)
    or five minutes by five minutes, during an hour or more’s mental work. This work was of a simple uniform character, e.g. adding pairs of figures, or erasing a prescribed letter through¬ out a printed text. Here, again, the value of rest pauses on subsequent output was demonstrated, and at¬ tempts were made to determine the most favorable length of rest pause for a given period of mental work. But the chief value of such experi¬ ments lay in the analysis of the work curve, which brought to light the play not only of practice and fatigue, not only, that is to say, of the ac¬ quisition of skill and of the loss of efficiency produced by exercise, but of (a) incitement, the warming up of the subject to his work after he had been withdrawn from it, (6) settle¬ ment, the neglect of distracting con¬ ditions-—and (c) spurts, of which the most striking are the initial spurt when the subject starts fresh to his work, and the end spurt when he realizes that the end of his work is approaching. FACTORY FATIGUE Valuable as have been the results of these laboratory experiments, they have proved far from adequate in their practical application. The con¬ ditions of laboratory experimenta¬ tion are widely removed from those of work-a-day fife. Muscular fatigue cannot be isolated in the factory, as in the laboratory, from such in¬ fluences as skill and intelligence which depend on the proper functioning of the highest levels of the central nervous system. The most unskilled labour is really skilled, in the sense that there are good and bad methods of carrying it out. Further, a worker’s movements cannot be com¬ pared with the movements of the subject of an ergographic experi¬ ment who lifts his finger repeatedly and rhythmically with the utmost force and to its utmost extent until he can move it no longer. The worker knows better than to exhaust himself in a relatively brief period by employing his utmost energy; he regulates his output according to his feelings of fatigue and accord¬ ing to the length of the period over which he has to work. Variations of output Thus it comes about that, whereas in laboratory research feelings of fatigue are not incompatible with a temporarily increased output of work, owing to the removal of normal inhibitory influence, in everyday life, as Muscio’s experiments2 have in¬ dicated, such feelings are more closely related to the varying output through¬ out the day. Moreover, as he has also shown,3 even when no work has been done, a worker’s efficiency, as demonstrated by interpolated tests, varies at different hours, the efficiency curve in a resting worker being similar in form to that re¬ vealed by actual work throughout the day but at a higher level. Adaptations to length of day The adaptation of the worker to the length of the working day has 2 Brit. Jour. Psychol., 1921, vol. xii, pt.2, pp. 150-162. 3 Ibid., 1920, vol. x, pt. 4, pp. 327-344.