Maintaining the right level of drunkenness.

• Position: Alcohol Consumption

Young people decide whether they have had enough to drink the same way the cruise control on a car "decides" whether to accelerate or decelerate. That Is the preliminary finding in an unusual study that aims to analyze drinking behavior the way engineers might analyze a mechanical system.

A team of social workers and engineers at Ohio State University, Columbus, used mathematical models to help explain the factors that drive alcohol consumption. They found that college students drank until they attained a certain level of drunkenness, and then adjusted the pace of their drinking--sipping versus gulping, for example, or switching to a nonalcoholic beverage--at different times throughout the night to maintain that level.

John Clapp, professor of social work and director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Recovery, has been gathering data on drinking among college students for more than a decade. He and his colleagues believe that analyzing all that data via engineering methods might reveal relationships among complex factors that would otherwise remain hidden. "We're looking for the best points to intervene strategically, so that we can aid a person in their decisionmaking and potentially derail problematic behaviors."

"The way students make...