The alcohol-dependent person (alcoholic): a behaviour analysis of this factor leading to alcohol dependence and excessive drinking.

FACTOR inherent in human behaviour is memory. Its attributes, even when drawn from personal experience, represent a continual learning process which generally takes place during man’s hours of waking when he is exposed to a variety of external stimuli arising from his environment, which ranges from pleasant, through unpleasurable to noxious; in ~s way he develops an experience of the type of muli that are to his advantage or otherwise. The processing of these stimuli creates in turn information that is capable of being selected or filtered, stored and made available for retrieval (recall), and represents the functions of memory. The actual substance that makes memory possible is stimulus energy (SE), a neurophysiological entity which initiates physico-chemical changes in the nervous system. The stimulation of receptor sites in the body, such as those which are concerned with sight, smell, sound, taste, touch and the like, act as transducers for the external stimuli, and in turn initiate the flow of SE to the various tissues and