• Question: why do adults behave differently when they are drunk

    Asked by georgiawel2002 to Iroise on 10 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Iroise Dumontheil

      Iroise Dumontheil answered on 10 Nov 2016:

      I don’t think that’s only adults, everyone would behave differently when drunk. This is not my research field but there is a lot of research on this out there.

      You can read about the mental effects of alcohol here for example:

      Short and Long Term Mental Effects of Alcohol

      Alcohol affects receptors in your brain cells that allow brain cells to communicate to each other. And the effects can lead to slowing down of movement and speech (through the GABA and glutamate systems) and give a pleasurable feeling (through the dopamine system). The effects also seem to depend on whether the alcohol levels in your blood are increasing or decreasing.

      There is more information here:
      http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa63/aa63.htm

      And also researchers are now looking specifically at the effects of alcohol on the brain of teenagers, and seem to find that teenagers may become more addicted to alcohol than adults.

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