The brain and C2H5-OH

I always used to wonder what’s in alcohol that brings about that mysterious change in us and I guess I managed to get a little close to that.

From what I could make out, first step is to realize a few facts about our brain. The human brain is an awesome CPU. And it is tremendously capable of multi-threading.

Picture this: You are riding the bike from home to office. There is a thread running in the brain which entirely takes care of everything from balancing the bike to handling it, filtering through the bewildering array of morning traffic noises, sensing if there is a horn blasting close to you, alert if you are straying too close to a mad rickshaw, checking for signals, needling potholes, and so on. You are hardly aware of all this happening inside your brain - This thread just runs in the background. At the very same time you might be running tens or hundreds of threads, each for one issue like worrying about the mail which you forgot to send yesterday, wondering about how to fix that troublesome bug in your software, pondering when to ask for leave, hoping your boss is on leave today, whether to have breakfast or not, whether there are cops around the next junction, so on and on. In short your brain expertly juggles between a hundred lines of thought, yet it takes care of the present - that of riding the bike through devilish traffic and steering clear of each and every pothole.

And strange thing is that, the thread which takes care of your present - your riding the bike - has to do the most amount of work and faces the biggest problems. Yet your brain runs that thread in such a way that you are hardly aware of the brain putting in so much effort; you are in another world, worrying about the past or thinking about the future.

In short the brain is a terrific CPU which can take care of the present without the person being conscious of it, and run 100 other threads which take care of different items important to your survival.
The term survival is the key word here. The brains capacity to take care of the present and run hundreds of survival-oriented threads are the key to the fact that man evolved and developed so much.

You can ride all the way from home to office without being conscious of the present even once; your brain gives you the freedom - rather forces you to - worry about the past and future and try to solve your existence problems meanwhile.

This specifically is the single factor which gets rid of pleasure from your world; you are not free even for a second to take a break and enjoy the present. It is as if your brain tells you - forget the present tense, forget about riding the bike, shifting gears, enjoying the morning sun, feeling the acceleration etc, I will take care of them - and concentrate on how you can solve the problem that await you in office or worry about those mistakes which you did yesterday and suffer thinking about them so that it will be a lesson enough for you to not repeat them.
Of course there is a question: Suppose at that instant there are absolutely no main issues or problems? I mean assume that we are in that extremely rare situation of having no problems as such. Since the brain has no issues to juggle around with, is it free to fully break into the present? Not really. We are so used to running different issues in our brain and handling the present in the background, its more or less the same thing that happens even now; Even though there are no issues and you are free to enjoy the present, your fundamental nature is to push the present into the background, then dig up some trivial stuff from the past or yank out some possibility from the future, and then run some threads to analyze them. That’s what happens and as usual
the present gets buried behind the curtain.

The brain is a master learner. The day you got your license and started riding your bike, that day would have been the best. You are new on to the road. You are not familiar with what an accident is. You are not familiar with cops out to rob you of money. In effect you ride the bike and enjoy it hundred percent because there are no other threads running in your brain. You are free to enjoy the present.

But the day a cop catches you, or you have a nasty accident, your brain stores it into memory. It is highly efficient; from that day onwards, you have another thread running in your brain; one to take care of cops or to take care of accidents. There goes half your pleasure, because now you are much less free to enjoy the act of riding.

Threads for cops and accidents are just two examples. For each of the bad incidents in your life, your brain pulls off a learning act and creates another thread.

In effect, a grown up person carries in his head multiple lines of alert threads, each to take care of a certain thing that had gone wrong in his past and may go wrong again.

Think about a child. Why do you think a child can enjoy this world so much? Because its brain is free. The brain is still beginning to learn and has not started stuffing itself with lessons and reminders and threads. It is free to enjoy the present and the beauty of a sunrise of the scent of a flower. While a grownup passes by the same scene, with hardly a notice of anything, just because his brain is busy carrying out a tremendous amount of work, manipulating and juggling so many issues from his past and future.

But look at the other side, the reason, the effect. The child on its own, without its parents or someone to look after it, won’t last two days in this world. While that grown up who passed by is a highly developed and evolved entity which can take care of itself and manage almost every emergency that is thrown at it. That specifically is the price which the child has to pay for its capacity to be in the present and enjoy beauty.

And the most important point - As the brain slowly begins to get overloaded due to its 'learning', it develops an awesome ability to take care of the present without conscious effort - so that a person can manage other extra burden.

Now where does alcohol come in? What does it do to give you that freedom, to give you a sort of break; Why do drunk people behave like kids; Why do they rip through the roads like maniacs, totally blissful, unaware and unthinking of every pothole cops and accidents. Even though you have a policy of not drinking and driving, why do you suddenly feel so confident about driving once you are drunk? Why are you least bothered about spending money when under the influence?

Why is it that you enjoy sitting with your friends and laughing at mundane things that you’d never had done when in your senses? Simple. Alcohol shuts down those threads we talked about. In other words alcohol kills your survival threads. And your brain goes from a multithreaded state to a single-threaded one.

No wonder you care two hoots about riding rash while you are drunk - There is no thread running in your brain telling you that riding fast is dangerous, there are cops around the corner or that you will have an accident. No! Your brain is now single-threaded and you are free to enjoy just one thing – feeling the wind on your face and gunning the bike.

Have you ever noticed that you are a better rider when drunk? Sure your friends would have mocked you when you made that statement. But that is true - up to a certain level of intoxication - just because your brain is free and the whole of it is ready to do those complex calculations of balancing a two wheeler machine through traffic and responding to every emergency. That immense but detached alertness you feel during drunken driving has a solid reason. Caution: this is only until a certain alcohol level. Refer xkcd below.



To summarize, you have a highly efficient brain handling hundreds of issues at any point of time - even though you may not be aware - and so overloaded that you just won’t enjoy the present. Now you take a bottle of alcohol and dump it into your stomach and the stuff creeps up and within the next 30 minutes hammers down each of those threads, converting the hyper-active survival-conscious brain into a single threaded CPU which is entirely at your disposal for thinking about or enjoying whatever you want to.

Why do you think Metallica said alcohol makes you numb and fall in love with life again. Because whether you realize it or not, the life as you call it is spend more or less fully in either planning for the future or worrying and learning from the past. Hardly does a human exist in the present. Irony is you need the help of a hard poison like alcohol to break into the present, and pay a price of dead brain cells, a fried liver and pair of wasted kidneys.

And finally the best example for asserting that for a drunk single-threaded brain, even pain can be pleasure - look at those who sit in front of a bottle gulping down glass after glass and worrying about that girlfriend who is getting married next week. What they say is we drink to forget the pain. Yet they drink everyday and just sit there thinking continuously about that ‘girl-of-their-dreams’. They are purely enjoying themselves. If sober, they just cannot cope with the reality of she going to someone else - because then the brain translates it to pure pain. Pain that reminds him of all the effort, energy (and money) he spent on her. The moment some alcohol goes down, the brain shifts to being single-threaded. Our dude in question is free to enjoy memories of the girl; maybe even cry and weep like a moron, but enjoying even that, every second of it.
People are jerks...

Disclaimer: This thesis was written after profound analysis of an experiment performed under controlled circumstances by another gentleman, whose name I cannot recollect at this point. I do not wish to claim any rights as to this being my piece of writing.

Also, please do not use this as a basis for contesting drunken driving violations. Thank you.