Drunk

Drunk, Edward Slingerland

Chapter 1: Why do we get drunk?

• Yeast produces alcohol to protect against bacteria, as the yeast and bacteria compete over a fruit’s nutrients
• Alcohol allowed for some preservation of resources that would otherwise be lost in a world without fridges. In Tanzania, banana and pineapple-based crops are preserved into a tasty brew that would otherwise rot
• Though most crops can be preserved in other non-alcoholic ways, like fermenting wheat and oats into porridges that are more nutritionally rich
• Alcohol also acts as a disinfectant, and would have acted to rid dirty water of pathogens, and can also provide medicinal properties
  • Though you can just boil water to rid it of pathogens, and fire has been around for a while. In China, tea drinking is common and cultural norms have made drinking unboiled water taboo, claiming it harms the qi
• Many recent studies are concluding that the individual health costs of drinking are overwhelmingly negative. But this is only analyzed at the level of the individual—not the level of the group. Too reductionist.
• Path dependence: when a prior path constrains future outcomes (e.g., our spines were designed for four-legged ambulation, not upright bipedalism, hence we get back problems. Evolution can’t see ahead around adaptive corners)
• Asian flush may have adapted to protect against fungus that appears in rice stores in damp environments. Normally when alcohol is processed by the body, ethanol is broken down into acetaldehyde, and then acetic acid, which is the broken into oxygen and carbon. Acetaldehyde protects against fungal infections. This breakdown of acetaldehyde is thus suppressed in some Asians, so when they drink a surplus of acetaldehyde is produced which inebriates them faster.
• Islamic prohibition of alcohol apparently arose due to companions of Mohamed becoming too drunk at a dinner to say their prayers
• Prohibitions of alcohol have been attempted throughout the world to no avail—societies keep drinking nevertheless
• The Mormon prohibition from alcohol (and coffee and Coca-Cola) may in part be a strategy to emphasize differences between other existing religious groups, as well as displaying a costly loyalty-inspiring display.

  Chapter 2: Leaving the door open for Dionysus

• In human mythology there exists a universality of high-stakes riddles. This is a symbolic representation of humanity’s (and life’s) main challenges: we need to be creative to survive
• Manioc is a toxic tuber that requires an elaborate process to detoxify. Portugal naively exported manioc from South America to Africa for its impressive and efficient yields. They neglected the cultural process required to detoxify it, however, and to this day contemporary Africans continue to suffer health problems by low-level cyanide poisoning. “Cultural evolution is often much smarter than we are.”
• Underdeveloped PFC in youth is a design feature, relaxing constraints and instead allowing the brain to encounter larger swaths of information to facilitate learning and knowledge accumulation
• Social emotions allow us to override selfish decisions, but only because we can’t consciously control them. “Love and honor that I can switch on or off when convenient is not true love or honor.”
• Social emotions bind us to longer term emotional commitments, restraining us from betraying others when selfish temptations call. Analogous to the siren myth, where Odysseus’s ties himself to the ship before swimming past the irresistible sirens.
• In the Daodejing, the Daoists compare the perfect sage to an infant: perfectly open and receptive to the world.
• Children are great at the three Cs that make us human: creativity, culture openness, communal bonding. As we age, we get a little less creative, a little less trusting, a little more ossified. Alcohol relaxes these inclinations, making us more child-like
• The default mode network is suppressed when taking LSD and psilocybin. The DMN seems to provide a basic sense of self, and when suppressed yields more cognitive fluidity, a fuzzier boundary between self and others, and reduced sensory discrimination and filtering
• “Dionysus (God of wine, fertility, emotionality, chaos), like a hapless toddler, may have trouble getting his shoes on, but he sometimes manages to stumble on novel solutions that Apollo (the sun God of reason, order, and self-control) would never see.”
  • The chaos/creativity introduced by alcohol can jump us out of local optimums that narrow-minded rationality can’t see beyond. Dionysus allowed selfish apes to stumble and dance their way into civilization

    Chapter 3: Intoxication, ecstasy, and the origins of civilization

• From Billy Wilder’s the Lost Weekend: “What does [alcohol] do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar.”
• We are typically good at sensing implicit emotional cues to gauge the trustworthiness of others. Nudging people to think more about judging trust in others stifles the moral reliability of our spontaneous intuitions.
• We have also evolved to deceive, and suppressing emotional leakage requires prefrontal horsepower. Alcohol suppresses this ability, allowing groups of intoxicated individuals to better suss out cheaters. This was especially important when potentially hostile groups gathered (to reconcile, matrimonially unify, or select a new chief which would otherwise be contentious), so these unions were typically accompanied by copious amount of booze
• The word bridal comes from “bride ale”, which bride and groom would exchange to seal the marriage, and crucially the new bond between families
• In addition to testing trustworthiness, many ancient cultures would ritualize getting drunk together to test the self-restraint and virtue of participants under challenging circumstances
• Robin Osborne: “Intoxication…both revealed the true individual, and bonded the group…those who would fight, and die, together established their trust in each other by daring to let wine reveal who they were and what they valued.”
• On talking of early American society: “Beyond the obvious usefulness of staid maize and potatoes, then, Emerson discerned a more subtle function for beauty (via Apple blossoms) and intoxication (via cider and applejack), equally important as bread and potatoes for us social apes.”
  • Maize and potatoes are extrinsically valuable, helping us survive. Apples (in this context) are intrinsically valuable, helping societies reproduce and grow
• Ecstasy (Greek ek-stasis) means “standing outside oneself.”
• “By enhancing creativity, dampening stress, facilitating social contact, enhancing trust and bonding, forging group identity, and reinforcing social roles and hierarchy, intoxicants have played a crucial role in allowing hunting and gathering humans to enter agricultural villages, towns, and cities.”

  Chapter 4: Intoxication in the modern world

• The obvious physiological and psychological costs of alcohol must be weighted against their benefits to creativity, contentment, and social solidarity
• The 70s and 80s industrial boom in Japan must have been in part facilitated by the “water trade.” This was the culture of Japanese salarymen binge drinking after work, which relaxed status differences and allowed juniors to bring more ideas to the table. Overall creativity must have been enhanced as well.
• Prohibition turned off social drinking by killing the saloon, and forced drinkers into isolation and small private gatherings, neutralizing the collaborative advantage of alcohol
• Michael Pollin: “Entropy in the brain is like variation in evolution: It supplies the diversity in raw materials on which selection can operate to solve problems and bring novelty into the word.”
• The prohibition stifled innovation, as supported by patent data from that time. Given the isolating nature of covid (reliance on impersonal teleconferencing, closure of cafes and bars), we might expect to see a similar drop in innovation
• Dunbar and colleagues note that what sets alcohol apart from cannabis and psychedelics are its use in social contexts rather than for quasi-religious experiences and solitary hedonic pleasure. “It opens the social pores.”
• Despite the physiological impacts on health from alcohol, one of the principal impacts on longevity is social connectedness, and alcohol helps us connect. Moderate alcohol use, if it encourages more meaningful social encounters, could have beneficial long-term effects on health
• “Subjects given alcohol rather than a placebo rate photos with sexual content as more appealing and choose to gaze at them longer. Interestingly, the effect is more pronounced in women, which may reflect greater inhibitions created by cultural norms that alcohol downregulates.”
• Our self critical color commentator—the self—so often gets in the way of just being in the world and enjoying it. Escape from selfhood is typically done spiritually (prayer, meditation, yoga) or through use of chemical intoxicants (getting drunk or high)
• Religious life has over the past few centuries has seen collective active bonding being replace by passive isolated individualism. Encouragement to combine takes context more and more in the passive sense—to passively observe some entertaining spectacle, whereas intoxication had them interacting in a dynamic and collective sense.
• Most of our leisure time is spend drooling in front of TV screens, video games, or our phones.
• When it comes to drinking, claiming that there is no “safe level” does not seem like a good enough reason to abstention; there’s no safe level of driving, yet governments do not recommend we avoid driving. This is because there are obvious benefits to driving, that it’s deemed worth the risk. The benefits of alcohol are not so obvious, they lie not only in the individual but the messy culture, so we have to find a better way of communicating these benefits
• Thinking that one method over another gives us special access to the divine is suspect. Everything we experience is chemically conditioned, whether it be meditation, prayer, a fast, or a chemical intoxicant. In all cases, we are simply modifying the body’s chemistry to modify how we experience the world.

  Chapter 5: The dark side of Dionysus

• “The NIH estimates that alcohol is the third highest preventable cause of death after smoking and lack of exercise.”
• Southern drinking culture (e.g., in Italy, where children are exposed to alcohol at a young age, drinks are only had at meals/social gatherings and are drank to complement the occasion, drinks are non-distilled) protects genetically alcoholic-susceptible individuals, whereas northern drinking culture (e.g., in United States, where children are strictly forbidden alcohol, drinking as a primary activity is common, distilled spirits are more common) have ineffective safeguards against distillation and isolation—the two innovations that produce alcoholics
• Distillation is a novel invention (arriving as early as the 1300s-1500s in China) that our evolutionary precedent did not prepare us for. Distilled liquors, being 10x as volatile as wines or beers, provide the quickest and surest routes to alcoholic dependence. Individualized, on-demand delivery of strong booze is unnatural.
• Cultural drinking norms and rituals allow groups of people to regulate consumption before the points of excess are reached.
• Prior to the advent of distilled liquor and unregulated private drinking, the dangers of alcoholism may have been outweighed by the social benefits. But as the world becomes more fractionated (i.e., the isolating nature of suburbs) and awash with distilled spirits, alcohol may be more dangerous than it is helpful.
• Dissatisfied couples tend to see an increase in relationship quality when under the influence (~0.08BAC). However, those already satisfied with their relationships see no change with alcohol, suggesting that the dissatisfied may be more drawn to alcohol as a crutch for those in unsatisfying relationships
• Religious songs, mantras, and chants increase CO2 levels in the lungs and bloodstream, changing the body’s chemistry and likely reducing oxygenation to the prefrontal cortex, bestowing practitioners with similar self-dissolving experiences as one might with alcohol (drunk on the spirit, not wine)
• In Ancient Greece, wine cups were deliberately shallow, spilling easily, to regulate consumption. In general, smaller glasses also help regulate consumption