FREE CASE EVALUATION

How Alcohol Affects Our Brain

Did you know that alcohol is a generic term describing a group of chemicals with common properties? Those common properties are volatility, slight or no smell, water solubility, and is composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.

Alcohol loves water and because of this attraction alcohol can be found in body tissue - where the water is. Once the alcohol is absorbed through your small intestine (primarily) it is rapidly carried throughout the body in the blood and once absorption of alcohol is complete all points in your body contain about the same amount of alcohol. This includes your brain.

Alcohol will affect various parts of you brain at different times. Each part is not equally affected. The “higher-order” parts are more sensitive to alcohol than the “lower-order” parts.

The cerebral cortex is the highest portion of the brain. It processes information from your senses, does your "thinking," and this is where you control your voluntary movements like “sit.” Alcohol will depress your inhibitions - as we all know. It will also slow down your ability to process information.

In addition, you will have difficulty seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting as well as you did before consumption. A person consuming alcohol will also begin to have exaggerated emotions and possibly memory loss. While all of these affects might create the “happy drunk” the most visible signs of impairment are with the movement of muscles.

Do you remember that a minute ago I mentioned that the cerebral cortex is the highest portion of the brain? Well, it so happens that muscle movement start in the cerebral cortex and travel through your spinal cord to the muscles.

As the nerve signals pass through the brain (containing water and alcohol after drinking) they are influenced by nerve impulses from another part of your brain and all of these impulses are “slowed” by the alcohol.

This slowing causes you to become uncoordinated - at least as compared to your coordination before consuming alcohol. In addition, alcohol depresses the nerve center that controls sexual arousal and performance--meaning an increase in sexual desire, but ironically a decrease in sexual performance.

Another effect can be a serious one. The brain stem controls or influences all of the bodily functions that you do not have to think about, like breathing, heart rate, temperature and consciousness. As alcohol starts to get to the medulla you will start to feel sleepy and may eventually become unconscious.

If your blood alcohol level gets high enough you can stop breathing, your blood pressure will decrease and body temperature will fall dramatically. These conditions can be fatal.

All of these effects get more pronounced as your consumption increases.

Typically your body metabolizes (burns off) alcohol at a steady rate which means that if you consume alcohol faster than your body can eliminate it the amount of alcohol in your body will continue to rise until you stop consuming or at least slow down . . . because your liver requires water to burn off the alcohol.

When you drink, if water is not abundant in your body to help your liver, your body redistributes whatever water is available. All parts of the body are affected by this redistribution of fluid, even the brain.

Finally, the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) is responsible for breaking down the alcohol in the liver. The tolerance that habitual drinkers build to alcohol is due to increased levels of ADH. Some research suggests that men tend to have more of this enzyme than women, and as a result can usually drink more than women of equal weight.

All in all, because of the effects alcohol has on your brain and muscle movement, drinking and driving is a very dangerous thing to do. Even if you don't injure yourself, you may fatally injure someone else.








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