Your brain on spring break

Spring break is almost here! It’s time to ring in the approaching warm weather with days off school, maybe a trip to the beach and definitely a cold beer. Here in Bloomington the arrival of spring break means an end to midterms and the beginning of the best times of the year. Little 500 week is just around the corner. It’s time to party!

Whether you choose to celebrate by sipping on a wine cooler, taking a tequila shot or braving a 45-second keg stand, more than likely you will be consuming some kind of alcoholic beverage, so maybe it’s time you understand what you are getting yourself into.

Adult beverages contain a type of alcohol known as ethyl alcohol or ethanol, and it is distinguished by its molecular structure. If you’re interested in what I mean by that, take organic chemistry to learn more. The ethanol forms through a process known as fermentation, in which yeast interacts with sugars to form the ethanol. The source of the yeast and sugar depends on the spirit. Typically wine comes from grapes, beer and whiskey come from different types of grains, rum from sugarcane, tequila from the blue agave plant, and vodka from cereal grains, potatoes or corn.

If you have consumed alcohol before, you know it can affect the way you see, move, act and think. It should come as no surprise to you after you consume alcohol and absorb it into your bloodstream through your stomach and small intestine that it mainly acts on the nerve cells in your brain. Nerve cells communicate through electrical signals and chemical messages known as neurotransmitters. Alcohol interferes with this communication. Alcohol can excite some pathways and suppress others, resulting in all those funny things you do while drunk.

Specifically, alcohol suppresses excitatory nerve pathways and excite inhibitory nerve pathways, causing sluggishness. The effects start in the very top of your brain in the cerebral cortex, the part of your brain responsible for voluntary muscle movement and processing your senses and thoughts. Alcohol affects your cerebral cortex, causing you to have fewer inhibitions and slowing down how quickly you can process your senses, increasing your pain threshold, and slowing your thought processes, possibly causing you to use bad judgment. That’s why it’s obviously not wise to drink and drive, even if you haven’t had very much to drink. As your blood alcohol content goes up as you consume more alcohol, the effects move throughout your brain and cause exaggerated emotions, memory loss, loss of balance and motor skills, increased urination and changes in sexual arousal.

While this is all very fun and interesting, there is a point at which drinking gets very dangerous. Drink too much alcohol and you can black out, stop breathing, have significant drops in body temperature and potentially die.The moral of the story is this: Have a fun and informed spring break and spring season, but do everything in moderation. Except hanging out on the beach. You can do that all day and all night long.


E-mail: kslabosk@indiana.edu