Initially, the strangers did not smile much. But as they consumed their vodka cranberry drinks, their expressions changed. They not only smiled more, but also caught each other’s smiles, and spoke more in succession. And they shared more of what researchers called “golden moments” when all three strangers smiled as one.
“It feels like the group is really coming together, and I think they’re part of that social, tipsy kind of experience,” said Michael Sayette, director of the Alcohol and Smoking Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh who was a co-author of the study.
What is it about being tipsy that is enjoyable?
Alcohol disinhibits the brain
Drinking is societally accepted but “alcohol is just like any other drug,” said Jodi Gilman, psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School and director of neuroscience for Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Addiction Medicine. “It affects the brain.”
Ethanol, the remarkably simple chemical compound that gives alcoholic drinks their buzz, permeates the cells of our body and brain within minutes of consumption. There is still a lot we do not know about alcohol’s effects on the brain. “It has such widespread effects in the brain,” said Jessica Weafer, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. Unlike other drugs that affect particular brain regions or act on specific receptors, “alcohol is just kind of going all over the brain” making it difficult to study, she said.
Alcohol is widely known to be a depressant, meaning it generally suppresses neural activity in the brain. It amplifies the effects of brain chemicals that inhibit neural activity — GABA and glycine — by acting on the same receptors those neurotransmitters bind to. At the same time, alcohol inhibits the effects of excitatory brain chemicals, producing a double-whammy of reducing brain activity.
As most people who drink may know, alcohol has a biphasic effect: initially and in low doses, it produces a buzz where we feel stimulated and disinhibited like we can dance or converse forever, before sleepiness settles in.
This rise and fall of our spirits corresponds with the rise and fall of our blood alcohol levels.
A look inside the inebriated brain
To see what happens in the inebriated brain, researchers gave willing participants alcohol via IV lines while they lay down inside fMRI neuroimaging scanners.
Alcohol may cause us to become disinhibited by dampening activity in parts of our frontal cortex, which is important for executive control functions such as inhibiting behaviors we don’t want to do. By inhibiting our inhibitions, alcohol makes us feel more stimulated.
Being pleasantly buzzed also releases dopamine and increases activity in the striatum, a key brain region associated with rewarding stimuli. Weafer and her colleagues found that neural activity in the striatum corresponded to how stimulated alcohol made the participants feel.
The participants were getting the alcohol intravenously, but still “they enjoy it, even though they are just kind of laying down in a scanner,” Weafer said.
Alcohol affects the emotion centers of the brain as well. In one study, alcohol dampened the neural responses in the amygdala to negative facial expressions, which may be a reason drinking can serve as a social lubricant, said Gilman, who led the study.
A bit of liquid courage may help us become less sensitive to rejection or social anxiety. But it could also lead to bar fights or inappropriate…
Read More: Why do people like being tipsy? Here’s how alcohol affects the brain.
