Why we drink

--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I had an answer for this earlier but I forget it now

cuz I like the simple woozy pleasures of getting bladdered and basically want to die?

Yup that works

i feel ya guys

for the jazz, man

cos the civil service five a side tournement finishef six hours ago

did you score a goal ffs

golden boot fyo

2 goals

pfft

behave

XD

i like to get tipsy (but less tipsy than the bargoers) and go to the train station near all the venues and clubs and stadiums around the time a lot of stuff begins and ends, some great dissonance between the falling-down-in-high-heels women leaving the shitty bars, sports fans from the suburbs trying to get the hell out of downtown, people still waiting in line to get into a club at 11:30pm, the cops mostly but barely restraining the basic anarchy of the whole situation

Bcz reading global tetrahedron posts takes too long

bcz karl hendricks, among others, is dead

I drink because alcohol is a psychoactive drug, useful for altering mood and awareness, and because wine can be an especially delightful and delicious form of this drug. In the past decade or so I've gotten away from the more extreme uses, leading to such ugly side effects as whirlies, belly overhang, and hangovers.

I might eventually experiment with weed again now that it is legal in Oregon, but at the moment I feel like my modest personal pharmacopeia of wine and coffee is sufficient to my needs.

Hmmm. I sometimes think of drinks as if they were friends. Metaphorically.

One and two are the acquaintances who overpromise and underdeliver. They never text you back, and they don't bring anything when they come over. But you need to stay on good terms with them because they're a conduit to the rest of your social circle.

Three and four are the friends you like a lot and wish you saw more often. You have a crush on four but you know you probably shouldn't.

Five, six: old friends who know you a bit too well. You're glad to see them, but they tend to egg you on into doing stuff you believe you'd outgrown.

Seven, eight: these are peripheral friends who are exotic, enticing, a little bit scary. You may want them in your life every now and then but a little contact goes a long way.

Nine? That motherfucker is out of control. Gonna borrow your car and crash it, or insult your mom. Avoid at all costs.

thats not bad

but i find that one and two in fact underpromise and once i get out with them they in fact have organised a surprise party with all the others

Let’s admit it though, eight and nine are also the smartest, funniest people you know.

they are but they dont seen to have jobs or families or houses so i have questions

eh also.....

nine, nine is not a big session

if nine is stealing yr car then yeah rly you ought quit drinking

nine is the poor sap that gets framed by his mates ten to twenty-five tbf to the lad

simplest reason i drink is to calm nerves, developed a slight shake due to lithium use many years back - alcohol definitely reduces that...

That's the GABA effects.

The first time I tried to quit it was in an outpatient rehab program with a psychiatrist who prescribed gabapentin, and that *totally* eliminated my cravings for the mental calm ethanol provided. I would be on it forever if it didn't also impair long-term memory formation.

gaba is not bad Sanpaku, was not aware about the memory side effects

one good thing about gaba is it also makes one tired, leading to less desire to drink ime

re the thread topic I like the conciseness of Bukowski: "When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat."

A more playful conception on a similar theme is voiced by David Niven's character in the 1960s Pink Panther movie with Claudia Cardinale, when he offers her a drink she says, "I am quite content with reality"; he answers "in my case, reality includes a good stiff belt."

xp: I'm not saying GABA's bad. We'd die without it and the other "inhibitory" neurotransmitters. Hell, I spent over a decade putting up with alcohol's other effects (most notably, weight gain), just because it was the only quick acting, cheap, and widely available means of getting anxiety and rumination under control at 1 AM. There was no pleasure per se, in it. Just relief.

It's just that (like all neurotransmitters), GABA is a double edged sword. It doesn't matter whether one perturbs dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, or GABA (etc) signalling with prescribed or recreational substances, they're never doing just one thing (as they're regularly connected by feedback loops to seemingly functionally unrelated parts of the brain), and with longer term use, homeostatic responses to counter the disturbance result in withdrawal syndromes/addiction, tardive dyskinesia, tardive dysphoria, etc. In my case, once I was prescribed a more targetted GABAnergic drug than ethanol, I personally discovered its well known effect in impairing memory formation.

Just FYI GABA is very different to those other neurotransmitters in terms of role and utility - I get very sick of the "balance of the humors" bullshit that psychiatry uses to try to explain the actions of drugs which are actually very poorly understood.
The reason you can mess with GABA and not die is that not all GABA receptors are pharmacologically identical, and some drugs (including alcohol) can exploit that to achieve specific effects. If you dialed up or dialed down GABA as a whole, it's either coma or seizure. It's the counterbalance to glutamate for all information processing in the brain - the other neurotransmitters shape the activity of the system but GABA and glutamate run the show.
Sorry - a hobby horse for me - I just grind my teeth when I hear twaddle like "oh well my serotonin levels were a bit low so my doc gave me serotonin booster X", actually most of these drugs are all over the place and affect multiple transmitter systems, which respond in poorly understood ways, and we just hope the brain makes sense of the new mess. Which is why they take time to act, and why it's not possible to predict which med will be most use to an individual.

http://media.tmz.com/2016/09/18/0918-yo-gabba-gabba-getty-4.jpg

MattK: GABA is different mostly in that its generally acts counter to excitatory compounds and systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if the complexity of receptor types and entanglement with other systems were comparable.

And yes, engineering mess that evolution left us with is poorly reflected by pharma marketing re: neurotransmitter balance. I'm mostly familiar with SSRIs, which I think will be viewed as mostly ineffective and in chronic use leading to worse outcomes, as barbaric, in the future. Someday, they'll be understood as only a very temporary measure (like dissociatives), stepping stones to regular exercise, regular sleep, and regular conviviality which actually do have antidepressant effects.

just FYI I am a neuroscientist whose research looks at GABA regulation in the cortex - basically cortical processing is glutamate/GABA working in overall balance to control information flow, whereas the "famous" neurotransmitters like dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin etc. act as modulators of that information processing setup. It's because of that modulatory nature that we can throw crude hammers like MAO inhibitors, SSRIs, D2 agonists into the machine and it doesn't explode. GABA is harder to tinker with but obviously there are many successful compounds that do (and generally better understood than the drugs affecting those other systems).

also I drink, so I'm in this thread to relate as well as lecture

also this is real:
https://misskisa.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/img_0399editblogblog.jpg

i drink because i'm an alcoholic and beer kicks ass

I like drinking wine while cooking. I like learning about the history of different wines and spirits. There is a Master of Wine who is a recovering alcoholic and hasn't had a swallow in over 20 years. He still works in the industry. I somehow find this remarkable that he can separate it.

I just read the book Proof, which is about the science of alcohol, and it's amazing how little we know about how alcohol works and why it does what it does to us. One of the more interesting studies in there showed that people across the board hate the taste/smell/etc. of ethanol, yet ethanol is essential to the alcoholic drinks we like, and without it all the flavors we gravitate toward that make up for the taste of ethanol taste less good without it.

Another fascinating study used a double placebo (or something) to mask which drinks had (a flavorless) alcohol and which didn't. Some drinkers were told it was alcoholic but it wasn't. Some were told it wasn't, but it was. Some were told it wasn't and it wasn't. Some were told it was and it was. (I think I got that right). Anyway, they found that in social settings and bars, people drinking the non-alcoholic stuff acted more inebriated, and in a clinical setting some told they weren't drinking alcohol but were acted less drunk. Or something like that. Neat stuff. I guess there are several fully functional lab bars across the country at various schools, because they found out that the social setting and decor and whatnot was often essential to the experiments to get better results.

(I no doubt got all this stuff half right. Read the book!)

Gonna grab a port, anyone wanna join me.

I like drinking wine while cooking. I like learning about the history of different wines and spirits. There is a Master of Wine who is a recovering alcoholic and hasn't had a swallow in over 20 years. He still works in the industry. I somehow find this remarkable that he can separate it.

― Yerac, Wednesday, August 1, 2018 9:17 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is like the guy who was the head bartender at the dead rabbit in nyc. i don't think he works behind the bar anymore and doesn't swallow when developing recipes. and he's an absolute genius with cocktails, the best i've ever studied.

just FYI I am a neuroscientist

http://cdn8.openculture.com/2017/05/04194055/McLuhan-Annie-Hall.png

gaba gaba we accept you

Yaba yaba doo

Self-medication, Thanatos, and it's too hard not to. I suppose it was fun, once.

I apologise if that was a dick move, not intended to be condescending

It was not a dick move. It was informative. The flak you got was just the usual internet breeze, and rather a gentle one at that.

I drink cos i hate myself

I'm looking forward to MattK's insights into how cholinergic/GABA balance may affect our lives. I don't think our comments are at odds.

Hm, well I'm not knowledgeable enough to wade in to cholinergics without doing some reading, but it's interesting that in Alzheimer's (the general area I work in) there are good reasons to suspect that the cholinergic forebrain system has a profound effect on the excitatory / inhibitory balance of the cognitive parts of the brain. In general this is a modulatory thing (via muscarinic receptors) rather than the direct-activation type thing we see with nicotinic receptors at a muscle. But I have some stuff to read on the basal forebrain system in the near future so I will be sure to save any snippets that look interesting!
And I didn't feel slapped down or anything, just on reflection thought that I may have come across as "well I am the authority on this so bow down to my learning" which is something you learn very quickly is an indefensible postition in neuroscience, there's always some major thing you know nothing about waiting in the wings ...

Fart

It is fun when the actual experts on ILX decide to drop a bomb on one of Sanpaku’s Let’s Plays though

(I also enjoy Sanpaku’s posts from time to time dgmr)

I'm a dilettante generalist. The world needs more of my kind.

And you're not off-base in the things you're saying, there was just stuff to add ... !
Fun fact: one way to fuck with the overall excitability of the brain is to interfere with the synthesis of neurosteroids, specifically allopregnanolone, which tops-up levels of inhibition when needed. You can impair that using a drug called finasteride which gums up a key synthesis enzyme - a large dose will reliably produce a seizure. However this drug also affects the steroid pathways involved in hair loss, so it's actually used at lower doses to treat balding, under the name Propecia. Guess what is the only drug usage disclosed by D Trump, President?

oh and being a synthetic steroid it waltzes across the blood-brain barrier, no problem - even rubbing it on your scalp would put it into the brain.

Want a drink, now.

I'm a dilettante generalist. The world needs more of my kind.

Why do you think that?

It might be just because it's early, but I feel like I missed a couple of the early 'for dummies' chapters and can't actually parse precisely what Matthew and Sanapku are saying about the dear old booze, neurologically speaking. What are the basics there (if it's not an imposition to ask)?

Fwiw, I just read Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring, detailing the alcoholic travails and games of Hemingway, John Cheever, Ray Carver and Tennessee Williams among others, and never want another drink as long as I live (OK, until tonight, at least). It put me in mind of a salutary line from a Malcolm Lowry biography I read where it said something like 'he knew things were bad when he drank a bottle of hair lacquer, thinking it was olive oil.'

xp:
1) It's more entertaining than police procedurals on TV.
2) We don't have nearly enough nonscientists who've seen the primary literature on subjects of universal interest. In climate change, it's terrifying.
3) Professional success in modern science requires a pretty narrow focus, and while there are a handful of journals that pride themselves on publishing outstanding work across disciplines, my sense is that some (most?) research communities rarely read or cite from even closely neighboring ones. Occasionally tenured textbook authors will be in a position to say, "hey, this process that group A is talking goes by a different name when group B is talking about it". For example, molecular biologists working on inflammation will focus a regulatory hub called NF-κB, while oncologists will focus on a closely related hub called STAT3. To an outsider these look a lot like adjacent gears in the same machine, and yet these two strands of research have run in parallel without much crosstalk for decades now. I sense there are turf wars and disincentives for integrating results.
4) Any individual dilettante will be subject to cherry-picking, myself included. This is remarkably common for MDs writing popular books. But perhaps enough amateur delvers would make this difficult.

I wonder what the original link said.

The booze molecules float up to the neurons devoted to worrying. Then the booze molecules give the neurons a gentle hug (with their tiny molecular arms) and say "there there."

nailed it (while the other booze molecules fuck with the cerebellum and shut off coordination for the lulz)

lately i haven't even been finishing the one can of pbr that i open after work

x-posts

I've had the Olivia Laing book on my shelf for an age and there's been something putting me off reading it (I loved the one on loneliness). I think it is probably not wanting to be put off drinking.

My wife made some powdered, fizzy vitamin C immunity boost drink the other night, and I asked if she wanted to mix it with something alcoholic. "Why would I make a healthy drink more unhealthy?" she asked. "You're looking at it the wrong way," I responded. "You would be making an unhealthy drink *more* healthy!"

i drink not to assault women but to temporarily forget the nightmare hellscape that is my country.

"I like beer"