Alcohol Boosts the Human Brain — if You Drink a Lot

Discovered: Alcohol helps accelerate the brains of heavy drinkers; Self-image affects self-expression; Antarctic lake hid evidence of never-before-seen life forms; Ancient humans liked to hike.

Alcohol helps accelerate the brains of heavy drinkers. How we experience alcohol — that is, as a depressant which disinhibits us — tends to inform the way we view long-term binge drinking. But according to a group of Yale University researches, alcohol affects the brains of heavy drinkers differently than the brains of more moderate imbibers. Specifically, alcohol increases the capacity of their brains to burn acetate, a chemical released when the body metabolizes alcohol. “Heavy drinkers transported more acetate to their brains and burned the chemical about twice as fast as light drinkers,”Science News notes. “Like a car that can switch to ethanol when it runs out of gasoline, heavy drinkers’ brains could tap energy from an alternate fuel source.” [Science News]

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Self-image affects self-expression. Does the way you think you look bear on the way you act? “There’s no easy way to test this in the real world,” the New Scientist acknowledges. That didn’t stop a group of Russian researchers from trying an outre method on several volunteers, who the group placed before a drum set and equipped with a virtual-reality headset. “Volunteers’ drumming patterns became more intricate when they were represented by a more casually dressed, dark-skinned avatar, as compared to a formally dressed white-skinned character,” the researchers discovered. The verdict portends a slightly scary virtual future: “This body-ownership illusion can lead to behavioural and cognitive changes that depend on the appearance of the virtual body.” [New Scientist]