According to a story by Guy Gugliotta in today's Washington
Post (09-20-04, page a6,
Science Notebook), Manfred von Richthofen, "The Red Baron", suffered from "perseveration, a brain dysfunction that causes people to persist in a task even when they know rationally that the chosen strategy is doomed and may be mortally dangerous." This is why he dove low into enemy airspace on April 21, 1918, even though it "violated all kinds of rules of flying--rules from the manual that he himself wrote", said psychologist and co-author Daniel Orme. "He had target fixation and mental rigidity."
In the case of von Richthofen, two retired Air Force clinicians, Orme and Thomas L. Hyatt, believe that the perserveration was caused when the Red Baron was left with a four-inch groove in his skull from a British bullet nine months before his death. After the injury Richthofen "brooded, behaved boorishly in public, and pulled childish stunts completely out of character for the careful predator whose 80 kills eclipsed those of all other World War I pilots."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hmmmm.....brooding; boorish behavior; childish stunts; target fixation; mental rigidity.....sound familiar to anyone?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The paper is pubished in the autumn edition of the journal "Human Factors and Aerospace Safety".
MRPLUTO
