- Being drunk affects your five senses:
sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing.
I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner
specializing in addiction,
and I'm gonna walk you through
how alcohol affects your senses.
Let me give you a disclaimer before I begin.
I'm gonna only be discussing
the short-term effects of alcohol.
[upbeat music]
First up, sight.
How does alcohol affect your sight?
After a few drinks,
you may notice that your vision starts to blur.
You also may notice
that your eyelids start to droop and feel heavy.
Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant.
- Hip-hip, hooray!
[audience claps]
- Normally, your nerve impulses are conducted very fast,
[toy car rattles]
but when you have alcohol, it goes very slowly.
Let me tell you how the eye works.
[desk top thuds]
This is your eye and how it connects to the brain.
Your eye sees the apple,
it reverses the image it conducts to your brain,
the optic nerve interprets what it is you're looking at.
It does this in a very rapid fashion.
But when you're drunk, this process can take a lot longer.
Blood cells from the heart
are being pumped all over the body.
One of the places they're being pumped is to the brain.
Those cells contain alcohol
that readily crosses this blood-brain barrier,
the senses are dulled,
and as a result those reflexes are much slower.
So when you talk to somebody that's drunk, you may notice
that they're just not tracking you, and they're trying hard.
The problem is they can't focus on you
because those impulses that say look here
are being conducted at a much slower rate.
It'll affect your pupils' ability to constrict and dilate.
The pupillary constriction and dilation
is controlled by the iris.
The iris gives your eye color, but it's also a muscle.
So when that muscle slows down,
you can't constrict and dilate.
Now, why would you do that?
Well, if headlights are coming at you,
say when you're driving down the road,
your eyes wanna constrict
to reduce the amount of light coming in the eye.
That happens much slower, you're more easily blinded.
[upbeat music]
Next up, hearing.
You ever notice when people have been drinking,
they start to talk a little bit louder
and enunciating their words?
Let me show you what your hearing looks like on a diagram.
[desk top thumps]
When you're sober, you normally can hear
by capturing those sound waves through your outer ear,
traveling through your middle ear,
and along the auditory nerve,
and your brain can interpret what's being said.
The volume sounds reasonable, you're able to match it,
and you can understand what's going on.
When you've had a few drinks,
well, that whole system slows way down,
and so you may start to speak louder
to get the other person to speak louder,
because the intensity and the clarity is diminished.
While we're here, let's talk about alcohol
and the effect on the inner ear,
and its effect on your balance.
It's proprioception time.
When you've been drinking too much,
you may notice that you start to stumble
or others may notice that you start to stumble.
The reason that happens is because the nerve impulses
conducting from the auditory nerve to the ear are slowed,
so you're not getting that feedback in a timely fashion
to keep your body upright.
[dramatic music]
[character thumps]
So the fluid in your inner ear is in a state of balance.
It's like a level.
That water bubble there,
your body can pick up when it's not level
and then you can really balance yourself in response,
but if you're not able to perceive the bubble being off,
then you're gonna fall down.
Lying down makes you feel worse
because now you've caused the fluids to shift again.
So now you're looking for another way
to garner input to the brain
to let you know that you're not gonna fall over.
So you may find that putting your leg on the ground
will give your brain another form of input
to stabilize that feeling.
And this brings us to our next sense, the sense of touch.
When you're sober, a frozen ice cube in your hand
can only happen but for so long
until you wanna get this outta your hand.
When you've been drinking,
an ice cube in the hand is like having a glove on.
Remember, the central nervous system
controls everything in your body,
from the brain down and from down, up to the brain.
[whoop whistle blowing]
Alcohol diminishes your sense of touch
in the same way it diminishes all your other senses.
You may have a hard time perceiving pain.
The conduction of the impulse from their feet to their brain
has been greatly diminished,
so they may not time their steps just right.
They may not lift their foot just right on the curb,
and as a result, fall down and injure their knee.
The skin receptor from the knee to the brain
may not conduct the impulse in a sufficient manner
to say hey, we're leaking blood here,
you've injured yourself, you've broken the skin,
and they'll continue walking because they're insensate.
So you may tolerate more painful things
where you would ordinarily pull your hand away.
- Hello, my dear!
- In the old days before we had formal anesthesia,
people would be given large amounts of ethyl alcohol,
ethanol, something like a high proof whiskey, vodka,
something like that.
The reason you do that
is because they were gonna do something very painful to you,
like pull out a tooth or amputate a limb.
Well, with enough alcohol in there, the goal was
that you would not conduct those painful impulses,
so you would sit still for this surgery.
Let's talk about how alcohol affects
your genitals.
So you've heard the expression whiskey dick or whiskey clit.
There's a line in "Macbeth" about alcohol
and how "it provokes the desire,
but inhibits the performance."
There's actually science behind that.
What's happening is alcohol has diminished the sensation
of your penis and your clitoris,
and so as a result of having diminished sensation,
you're not having the necessary blood flow
to cause engorgement
for an erection of the clitoris or the penis.
The way you know you're aroused is desire,
and then you have an erection,
or you have some increased genital pressure
that needs to be relieved,
and that's normally relieved in an orgasm,
but the problem is there's no sensation,
so then there's no blood flow,
so then there's no orgasm.
And now we're gonna talk about taste.
Taste is one of the first things
you'll notice about alcohol.
[upbeat music]
You may notice that the more you drink,
the less the taste bothers you.
[glass softly thuds]
This is water, by the way.
When you drink alcohol,
you'll have desensitization of your taste receptors.
Let me show you what that looks like.
[desk top thumps]
When you drink, you pour alcohol directly on your tongue,
and this slows down the nerves
conducting from your tongue to your brain.
The nerves that conduct the flavor
are off your cranial nerves.
Your glossopharyngeal nerve and your vagus nerve
conduct the flavor from your tongue to your brain.
So what creates desire for the different flavors of alcohol?
Basically, it's the dopamine that's associated with it.
So why do some people like really sweet things
and some people like really bitter things?
Different people get dopamine release for different reasons.
Your sense of taste
is greatly impacted by your sense of smell.
When you're sniffing wine,
[Rory inhales]
the odor enters my nose and my olfactory nerve
is able to distinguish what it is I'm smelling.
[Rory inhales]
So when you smell the wine, you can almost begin to taste
the various components of what will be in the wine.
You'll hear oenophiles say things like
this wine has a full bouquet
with degrees of minerality and ripe fruit.
The more experienced you are at smelling wine,
the more you can detect just by odor alone.
[Rory inhales]
However, the more of this wine that you drink,
the subtlety is then lost on you
and you start to just say red wine or white wine.
What they're doing is they're distinguishing
the various molecular properties of that fermented grape
that tend to remind them of those respective fruits.
When you become intoxicated from drinking too much alcohol,
your ability to discern those nuanced smells and flavors
is greatly diminished.
Let me bring out a diagram.
[upbeat music]
[desk rattles]
[desk top thumps]
Alcohol affects your sense of smell
as it enters through the front of your nose.
The odor enters here and goes into the nasopharynx.
When you get congested,
the blood vessels that run through the nasal passageway
and through your sinuses and around the olfactory bulb
become congested and engorged with blood
because the smooth muscle dilation within the vessel
has made the vessel bigger so more blood can go there.
That blood puts pressure on the olfactory bulb.
As a result of putting pressure on the olfactory bulb,
your nose becomes congested.
You may even hear someone that's been drinking too much
start to sound a little nasal.
By the end of the night, they start sounding like this.
That disgusting toilet in the dive bar, you may not smell.
Those are the effects of alcohol in the short-term.
Some long-term effects of alcohol dependency
include neuropathy, malnutrition,
gastritis, and hypertension.
Now, I don't wanna be a total naysayer about this.
There are some pleasurable things about alcohol.
- Hip-hip, hooray!
- But in excess,
it can lead to a lot of serious complications.
That's how alcohol affects your five senses
on our journey with alcohol and the central nervous system.
[upbeat music]