The Trembling Finger

Dr. Austin S. Edwards of the University of Georgia works for a tobacco-growing state, but in the latest Journal of Applied Psychology he reports one effect of tobacco smoking: it increases "finger tremor," an indication of disturbance in the nervous system.

He tested a group of psychology students with a "finger tronometer" (his own invention), which measures the trembling of an outstretched human finger. First he measured the students' "finger tremor" before they started smoking. Then he let each of them smoke half a cigarette, and measured their tremor again. The fingers of the hardened smokers, he found, had increased their trembling 39%. Students who had never smoked before were hardly affected.

They owed their immunity, Dr. Edwards suspected, to the fact that most non-smokers do not inhale when they try a cigarette. So he divided the steady smokers into inhalers and non-inhalers, and tested them again. The non-inhalers showed no significant increase in finger tremor. But the fingers of the inhalers trembled like aspen leaves: 82% more than before they began the cigarette. Cigar and pipe inhalers reacted the same way too. Moral: if you like to smoke but not to tremble, don't inhale.

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