Heavy drinking can cause blindness

Those who drink will easily ignore objects that appear unexpectedly in sight, even if their blood alcohol content is only half the driving limit.

Alcohol narrowed attention to a small angle in a scene. (Photo: painetworks) Dr. Seema Clifasefi at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, says this phenomenon is called blindness due to negligence, sometimes Also occurs in alert people.

Alcohol is still known to affect driving ability, reaction time and visual attention, but so far no research has investigated its effect on blindness.

To investigate, the researchers showed 47 volunteers a video of two groups of players passing the ball back and asking them to count how many times the team wore white shirts.

In the videotape, a woman in an orangutan costume appears among the players, standing in the middle of the screen, banging her hand on her chest, then leaving.

Participants were given a drink about 5 minutes before watching the video. After watching, the research team asked if they saw the orangutans.

Half are given fake alcohol, half drink vodka and tonic so as to raise the blood alcohol level to half the amount allowed to drive.

Half of the people in each group were told that they had been drinking alcohol, the other half believed their drinks did not contain yeast.

Those who know that they have been drinking alcohol report feeling more intoxicated, even when they drink fake food. But even if they were told that drinking alcohol or not, it did not affect their ability to see the orangutan.

In total, 1/3 do not recognize the orangutan. Among those awake, 46% looked at the animal, compared to 18% in the drunken group.

"The results show that alcohol has caused transient blindness , " Clifasefi and the team concluded. "In our study, alcohol narrowed attention to a small angle in a scene (volleyball counting), making other information in that scene (orangutans) easy to ignore" , they say.

In this case, only a glass of alcohol can blind you, the group added.

MT