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In Enoch Gordis's article Cognitive Impairment and Recovery from Alcoholism, he talked
about a lot of the effects alcohol can have on the brain. He also talks about how those
effects on the brain change and affect our bodies. This article reflects many of the ideas
and concepts that the class has been faced with and serves as a warning about the
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consequences of drinking. Many people may have friends and family who drink alcohol
socially and they probably know someone who is a drunk, or had their lives changed by a
drunk driver. So this article could touch people on so many levels. Personally my father
and several of my uncles were heavy drinkers for years and three of my friends were
involved in alcohol related automobile accidents. In this country liquor seems to be
emphasized by people instead of advertised by companies, with the exception of beer. So
why is alcohol so popular? I think it is because American society is based on being number
one in whatever you do and the mind-altering effect of alcohol gives people that sense of
being on top and some people just can not let it go, while others can not stand the
hangovers. Alcohol frees people from their insecurities and inhibitions, the superego, and
replaces it with the cravings of the id, the most primitive part of personalities. Which
would lead to the conclusion that alcohol keeps people from thinking clearly.
Cognition is defined as the mental processes involved in thinking, knowing, perceiving,
learning, and remembering. It is no secret that consuming alcoholic beverages tends to do
everything it can to impede cognition. But the long term effects of drinking may or may
not be insurmountable. Brain damage may occur as the result of years of heavy drinking
and some people even develop brain disorders which make them incapable of remembering
new information for longer than a few seconds. Alcohol does not need a lot of time to
effect your brain because even adolescents who participate in binge drinking show signs
that liquor is interfering with their ability to learn and be successful in classes. There have
even been studies which showed that the brain damage caused by drinking may even slow
the process of recovering from alcoholism even after one's drinking days are over. Other
studies show that brain damage caused by alternate studies may also contribute to
alcoholism(Gordis 11).
Even though alcohol may impair cognition and cognitive processes drinkers and
non-drinkers will probably score the same on intelligence tests. But if given a test that
involves critical thinking or "thinking outside the box" the non-drinker will almost always
do better, because alcohol interferes with higher thinking processes especially. In essence
alcohol strips a person of their creativity as well as their ability to think. If a person who
was a heavy drinker was asked to file papers he or she would be able to complete the task,
but if they were asked to create a new system for filing papers they would not be able to
do it(Gordis 1). Alcohol in a sense may take away your ability to be extraordinary or to
be an innovator. So it is of great interest to understand how alcohol does this to the brain,
when college students are thought of as the leaders of tomorrow and they are also
associated with the world of binge drinking and drug abuse.
Alcohol has the ability to shrink the overall size and density of the human brain as well
as change brain cell activity throughout the brain(Gordis 1). The fact that alcohol tends
to change the way your brain physically works is most intriguing. This classifies alcohol as
a psychoactive drug because it is a chemical that affects mental processes and behavior by
their effects on the nervous system. Computerized tomography (CT Scan) and magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) are two forms of brain scans used to generate pictures of the
living tissue inside the brain. A CT scan creates a computerized image of the brain from X
rays passed through the brain at various angles. MRI's use powerful pulses of magnetic
energy to get different responses from different types of tissues inside the brain to form
images. Positron emission tomography (PET scan) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy
allow neurologists to see brain cell activity. The PET scan detects brain cell activity by
tracking the movement of radioactive substances in active regions of the brain. PET scans
rely on the detection of atomic particles known as positrons that are emitted by a
radioactive administered to patients(61). It is through brain scans that scientists can tell
that an alcoholic's brain almost always has less volume and density than a nondrinkers
brain. The two regions of the brain that lose the most volume are the frontal lobes of the
cerebral cortex and the cerebellum(Gordis 1). The frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex or
the pre-frontal cortex, is responsible for planning, deciding, one's personality,
temperament, speech, and control of the body's voluntary muscles(Zimbardo 66). The
cerebellum located near the back of the brain is coordinates movement, controls posture,
and maintains equilibrium. The cerebellum is also involved in learning, specifically classical
conditioning, which allows us to give responses to new cues, like when a bell rings we
know it means something, rather it be time for the next class in high school or it's time for
church to begin(6).
But some instances of brain impairment caused by alcoholism are reversible by
abstaining from drinking. Recovering alcoholics begin to regain problem-solving abilities,
short term memory, brain volume, and their ability to pay attention after several months to
a year of not drinking. The brain itself has the power to change the patterns and pathways
of brain activity. Scientists have seen the brain send information away from those regions
of the brain that have been damaged due to alcohol through alternate brain systems with
the help of brain scanning, in recovering alcoholics. Pfefferbaum and colleagues examined
the brain activity of cognitively impaired alcoholic participants during a series of tests
designed to assess cognitive function. The results of the test concluded that the brains' of
the alcoholic participants would use different nerve systems than, the control,
non-alcoholic participants to complete the tasks equally well. This finding is especially
uplifting for the young drinkers found in college because their brains are still creating
nerve-cell networks which send the information out from the brain to the rest of the
body(Gordis 14).
For all that scientists know about the brain and alcohol they are not sure how cognition
effects alcohol treatment. That is they know how alcohol effects cognition but they do not
know how the effects of alcohol apply to curing alcoholism. Cognitively impaired patients
may not have the means to understand the therapy and might not use strategies presented
to them to cure alcoholism. Another possibility is that cognitive functioning may not
influence alcoholism but it may have an effect on something else that could help stop
alcoholism. A few examples include getting a patient to focus on the importance of
exercising and nutrition, this may cause a recovering alcoholic to view alcohol as toxic to
their bodies. One last view on cognition's effect on recovery is that a patient wait after
the first weeks of being clean to try any therapy because cognitive impairment is usually
the worse in this period of time (Gordis 15-16).
After reading this article I felt like I had a better understanding of alcoholism and in
particular recovering from dependency. I also found out a lot about the realm of
psychology and how all the disciplines interact in the "real world." I say the "real world"
because I have been sheltered from so much, but alcoholism is one of the few social ills I
have been a witness to and had to live with. In doing this project I was somehow able to
link the old school theories of Freud with the technology of today, which also gives a lot
of meaning to what we do in class, and lets me know that this is information I am going to
use in my life.
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