This is your brain on whisky: its sluggish, predictable, non-chaotic, linear and neurochemical messages never reach their intended targets. Your brain on whisky, and all alcohol for that matter, is simple less adaptable.
"Your brain is healthiest when it's more chaotic and more non-linear, and any alcohol can take your brain out of that complex state," said Dr. Michael Noseworthy, an imaging specialist from McMaster University. "When your synapses aren't firing, your adaptation is going to be sluggish."
That inability to adapt is what got Noseworthy and researcher Alex Weber thinking about alcohol and the brain. They were wondering if Canada's alcohol laws with respect to driving accurately measure the amount of alcohol in the brain, and what impact an amount of alcohol has on the brain as a whole.
For an imaging specialist like Noseworthy, with 26-years in the field and the title of co-director of McMaster's School of Biomedical Engineering, the question was not just how much alcohol was in the brain, but more how does it impact the brain's ability to react.
In Canada, the legal limit of of alcohol in the blood while driving is no greater than 80 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood. Breathalysers measure the amount of alcohol in the blood, but not necessarily the brain, Noseworthy said.
And while exploring the effects of alcohol started their research, it takes a drastically different step later on. They know that the brain is sluggish in certain diseases like Alzheimer's, and for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy (something called "Chemo brain"), but they had to develop a test to prove that fact and research why.
Which brought Noseworthy back to the liquor cabinet. In this case, it was a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whiskey in his office (a gift from a former student, he said) which served as the perfect tool to develop a baseline sensitivity test for a sluggish brain.
Their methodology: take an MRI of the baseline brain, add six ounces of whisky, test, and then test again after an hour and a half.
By using blood oxygen level-dependent imaging they were able to detect the amount of activity which was going on in the brain. Immediately after the 14 participants downed nearly half a mickey of Bushmills, the brain showed considerably less chaos. Ninety minutes later, the brain's normal chaotic state began to return.
"The alcohol makes the brain become really sluggish and less adaptable," Noseworthy said.
Less adaptability means a driver would have less of a chance of hitting the brakes in time, or at all.
Those findings, which were published in August in the journal, Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine, could lead Noseworthy to a better understanding of how much alcohol a person could have to perform a function such as driving by measuring the adaptiveness of the brain. It could also lead him to better understand the impacts of other drug treatments, too.
"We now have a technique that's sensitive to this complexity of the brain, now we're going forward with measuring it in diseases," Noseworthy said.
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