This is a machine transcription and is subject to error. Apologizes in advance. 

hi everyone my name is Gina and I'm an intern in the Health and Wellness center team here with professor Cry and we're gonna be talking
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about the effects that alcohol has in the brain before we start for people that don't know you do you mind just giving
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a brief overview from the things you do on campus. so I'm a professor and both the biology
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department and the neural science program and I teach different classes mostly
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on neural biology. I also have a pretty active research lab and right now I have
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four full-time summer research students which is a lot of fun. that's awesome. Um
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so the first question I have you is kind of simple when someone's drunk what's actually happening in the
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brain. so in general alcohol is causing changes to functions
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of neurotransmitters in the brain and these are major neurotransmitters neurotransmitters
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glutamate which is your major excited touring transmitter and Gab which is the major inhibitory
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transmitter another major neural transmitter the alcohol is well known to affect is dopamine
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and alcohol can also affect certain hormones that are produced in the brain. thank you.
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I'm so what actually affects it someone who's drunk is experiencing and why do we feel these effects. so
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we don't fully understand all of the ways in which alcohol affects the brain but
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one way is that we know the alcohol and the next gapa that's that inhibitory neural transmitter
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and this can cause sedative effects. so alcohol also inhibits
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as the excitatory transmitter glutamate which can also have sedatory effects
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but this can affect other things like it can cause slurred speech changes in memory and at
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high doses of alcohol can even because blackout alcohol
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alcohol 's effects and the neural transmitter dopamine are really interesting because alcohol
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will increase dopamine in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens and this makes you feel good.
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this is a good part of drinking alcohol because it's activating your reward system. right.
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but if you repeatedly drink alcohol this can actually cause changes in dopamine.
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such that there is a reward deficit in the system and that's what can contribute to
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symptoms of things like withdrawal right. alcohol also has effects
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on hormones and one of those hormones is called vasopressin or anti- diuretic hormone this hormone
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acts to actually keep water in the body but alcohol impairs the function
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of this hormone right. that means that when you drink alcohol you're actually
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losing a lot of water from your body and that makes you dehydrated to right. yeah. and this
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is what contributes to making you feel miserable and hung over the next day right yeah and also why you should drink
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lots of water when you're drinking alcohol. definitely we hear a lot about the negative effects of alcohol
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but are there positive effects alcohol can have on the brain so at low doses there
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can be positive effect of alcohol probably the best know are on the heart rate
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but there was a recent study that came out in mice showing that low doses
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of alcohol can help actually help the brain get rid of waste oh wow and this is super
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important because this can actually help prevent conditions like dementia right.
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however I do want to emphasize that the same study showed that chronic alcohol use
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actually made it harder for the brain to get rid of waste huh. so this means that it actually
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increases your risk of dementia yes it's kind of a thin line like a positive and negative
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right that I have. so what does it mean that when people said alcohol is a depressant and why
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is alcohol considered as a depressent. so depressing is a drug that's going to decrease your nervous
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system activity so slow neuronal firing right and again alcohol
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affect on the neurotransmitters and again one of those is Gaba so it mimics Gaba
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and Gaba is going to slow neuronal firing that's what that's how alcohol slows Neuronal firing
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other drugs that are depressants like valume also increase Gaba
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function right right now this is one of those reasons why you don't want to do things like mix your depressants yeah
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right. can you talk little bit about the different ways alcohol affect our memory. so
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alcohol effect memory in many different ways and there are different types they're actually different types of
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memory. probably the best studied in the context of alcohol is something called explicit
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memory and so explicit memory is a type of long term memory. where you remember
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facts and events and it involves a conscious recall from your brain. right
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yeah. so this is things like remembering what you ate for dinner last night or remembering with
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the capital Rhode Island of is or something like that right yeah and we know that alcohol can affect explicit
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memory and and very high acute doses it can actually cause blackouts
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and what blackouts really are a loss of this explicit memory. okay so this could happen
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in two ways you can have what's called fragmentary blackouts where you lose your memory
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but you can recall that memory if given specific cues right. yeah. I can also
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cause something called n block memory loss which is permanent amnesia that happens
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basically during the time of intoxication and all of these effects are cause
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by alcohol actions on a area in the brain called the hippocampus as well other areas
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including parts of the frontal lobe. why can someone become depended on alcohol and what are
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kind of the long term effects of alcohol has on our brain. so alcohol can have
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many long term affects many negative effects on the brain especially with chronic use
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mostly because alcohol is addicting and addiction really is a brain disease. that's
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the way that we look at it right now. so what do you start to drink repeatedly. you
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will increase your tolerance right and tolerance is basically when
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you're not gonna get the same feeling of intoxication by drinking the same amount that you usually do so you have to
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drink more to get that desired effect rate independence is
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when you need to drink more to avoid symptoms up withdrawal so that is a little bit more serious. yeah.
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so what happens is that with chronic use alcohol is really gonna hijack certain parts of your
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brain. one of those places is the reward system. and when this happens the
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person will have withdrawal symptoms if they stop drinking right and this of course leads to
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more drinking. yeah right. so we also see changes and how
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alcohol affects regions of the brain like the striatum and this is a region that controls
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habit. so basically you're increasing your habit to drink alcohol right
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and we see changes in other regions of the brain that control things like our stress response
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and all of these changes that alcohol is causing with chronic use are basically promoting
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the person to want to drink more alcohol alcohol seeking behavior. yeah. we call it right.
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so what's interesting is that there's recent evidence that the brain
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is also changing in ways that the person not only wants to increase their alcohol seeking behavior
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but also increase seeking behavior for the cues that surround alcohol okay. so
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things like what bar they go to if it's something like that or interesting on the music and that
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they're listening to at the time so basically what's happening is that your brain is telling you
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that you want alcohol and you want the things that surround the experience
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of drinking alcohol. interesting. right so in that drive
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can lead to it even more excess alcohol consumption yeah all of the negative things I go along with that. wow
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you spoke a little bit about tolerance but can you talk about kind of what factors affect someone's BAC
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level and their tolerance to alcohol. so lots of factors affect BAC
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and tolerance to alochol. one is going to be how fast are you drinking right
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the faster you drink faster your blood alcohol increases and the faster
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you're going to feel intoxicated. this really has to do it how your liver metabolize
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the alcohol so the liver can metabolize
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about one standard drinks per hour. right so if you drink more than that in
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one hour. your liver really can't keep up right. yeah. and
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so that's going to make you have more alcohol in your blood system and then what's being processed
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in your liver going to make you feel more intoxicated. this also plays
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into tolerance right so as you drink repeatedly your liver starts to
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change how it processes. Alcohol it's now processing it differently and
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it's processing it in such a way that you need to drink more to feel intoxicated
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this doesn't necessarily affect your blood alcohol content. oh right. so
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you your blood alcohol content may be high but you don't feel intoxicated
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because you have higher tolerance okay. another factor
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that can affect him but alcohol content is body weight. so if you're small like
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me right. you have less blood volume. uh-huh and
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you have less blood volume essentially to dilute the alcohol and you're going
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to feel more intoxicated with less alcohol. um-hum
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how much and what you've eaten. also affects blood alcohol content. so alcohol
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can't be absorbed through the walls of your stomach the most of it is actually absorbed through the walls
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of the intestine. okay. so if you eat in and there's food in your stomach
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being digested. what happens is there's a valve that actually closes the connection
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between the stomach and intestines okay there's alcohol in the stomach with that food being ingested
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it's going to prevent that alcohol from that valve gonna prevent yeah from
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getting to the intestine and and less will be absorbed. okay. opens right. yeah
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and because fatty foods take longer in the stomach to digest. they're actually better
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at slowing alcohol absorption then other types of foods like carbohydrates. yeah.
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do you have any recommendations for like what somebody who's choosing to drink alcohol can do to be safe.
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so basically what you wanna do is do things like eat before and
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when you're drinking too so that you are going to absorb alcohol slower
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right. also space out your your drinks. obviously drink less. yeah.
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but if you're doing other things you're gonna drink less anyway yeah. also
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remember to avoid that awful hangover. you should be drinking lots of water.
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definitely awesome well thank you so much for sitting down and talking me today about alcohol
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's effects on the brain and for anyone listening if you want more information or you feel that you need to talk
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to someone about your alcohol use. you can defineitly reach out to the health and wellness Center by e-mailing wellness@stonehill.edu or you can visit us in the lower dining commons
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This is a machine transcription and is subject to error. Apologizes in advance.