Understanding the full dimensions of alcohol’s impact on mammalian and primate genetics, brains, and emotional and mental states is a work in progress. For example, in 2004 researchers reported that lower levels of CREB (cyclic AMP responsive element binding) protein and neuropeptide Y—crucial compounds for learning, emotional stability, and feeding in mice—were linked to having only one copy of the CREB gene rather than the normal two. The deficient mice, possibly because they were less able to control their appetites, were driven to drink: they preferred alcohol to water and lapped up half again as much alcohol as their littermates.
One gene in humans, ALDH1 (aldehyde dehydrogenase 1), shows that genetics really do matter for understanding alcohol consumption. Overindulging in alcohol can destroy liver cells and increase susceptibility to various cancers, especially of the upper gastrointestinal tract. Our metabolic systems are prepared for the assault up to a point. Alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes transform any alcohol that enters the body into acetaldehyde. But because acetaldehyde is more toxic than alcohol, the ALDH gene produces another enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase, that converts the acetaldehyde into relatively harmless acetate. A variant of this gene (ALDH1), however, throws a molecular monkey wrench into the works and in so doing demonstrates how our genetic constitutions can significantly impact our intakes of alcohol.
The ALDH1 variant rids the body of acetaldehyde less efficiently than the normal gene. Virtually nonexistent among people in the West, the mutation occurs in about 40 percent of Asians and causes unpleasant symptoms for carriers who drink alcohol. Their skin flushes to a bright red, and they experience nausea and dizziness.
Why should such an anomalous gene, which subjects the body to a perilously high level of acetaldehyde, persist in the human genome? The probable explanation is that it protects these individuals from the even more damaging effects of excessive alcohol consumption. The implication is that some time during the course of human evolution in Asia, one solution to problem drinking was a genetic mutation. Of course, humans, being naturally innovative, will try to find a way around even a genetic roadblock. In China, one determined ALDH1 carrier simply drank minute amounts of alcohol throughout his waking hours, thus staving off the worst effects of acetaldehyde poisoning while maintaining a perpetual state of inebriation.
Scientists have already articulated many of the key elements in a neural and genetic explanation of how the modern human brain behaves under the influence. These processes are largely beyond our conscious awareness. Each person’s response to alcohol is unique. For example, a person prone to depression or risk taking is more apt to overdrink to relieve negative feelings or get a thrill. For an artist or poet, an alcoholic beverage may liberate the imagination.
The emerging picture of how the intoxicated human brain reacts may seem daunting, with hundreds of genes and a vast array of interconnecting neurons, neurotransmitters and their receptors, and enzymes to catalyze and coordinate the complex chemical symphony. Inject some alcohol into the system, and it’s off and running. You can be excused for crying out for a drink, as your head swims with the complexity.
When you take that next drink, beware of the neuroscientist who may be watching. As an example of the power of the new, noninvasive techniques in monitoring the brain’s activity under the influence, Alessandro Castriota-Scanderberg of the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome used f-MRI in 2002 to test the tasting abilities of seven wine sommeliers and seven novice drinkers. Enclosed within the claustrophobic confines of the MRI cylinder, the subjects were given wines through plastic tubes while Castriota-Scanderberg scanned the parts of the brain that lit up in response. Predictably, every subject’s orbitofrontal cortex and insula (part of the limbic system), which process olfactory sensations, became active. The sommeliers, however, showed activity in some brain areas that were quiescent in the novices’ brains. The amygdala and hippocampus of the sommeliers’ brains suggested they were extremely motivated, perhaps racking their memories for clues in discerning the wine’s taste. Their prefrontal cortices also went on high alert, probably as they sought to describe in words what they were experiencing. But if you thought that the professional tasters were totally objective in their assessments, you would be sadly mistaken. Other f-MRI studies have shown that tasters are much more strongly influenced by the color of liquid and the label on the bottle than by its actual taste. In one deceptive experiment, the tasters thought they were drinking a red wine, but it was actually a white wine colored with a red dye.
THE CULTURAL PART OF THE EQUATION
Once our species started down the road of drinking alcoholic beverages, there was no turning back. At the same time that the human body and brain adapted themselves to the drug, those unique symbolic constructions of humankind—its languages, music, dress, art, religion, and technology—were emerging and even reinforcing the phenomenon. How else can we explain the near-universal prevalence of fermented-beverage cultures in which alcoholic beverages (whether wine, beer, mead, or mixed grog) came to dominate entire economies, religions, and societies over time? In such cultures, everyday meals, as well as social events and special celebrations from birth to death are marked by the drinking or offering of an alcoholic beverage. Many examples might be cited from the Old World; in the New World, the wine and beer cultures of California and Australia might be viewed as among the latest entries.
The connection between alcoholic beverages, religion, and the arts is especially pronounced in the archaeology and history of our species. Music, for example, is wonderfully adapted to conveying a range of information—from matters as specific as territoriality and sexuality to the more nebulous realm of emotions, which alcoholic beverages also impinge on. When we talk to infants or pets, we tend to fall into a primitive language of fragmentary song, simplified words, and exaggerated facial and body gestures, almost as if this behavior were programmed into us and the creatures that we are trying to influence. If we accept the premise and ever-accumulating evidence for a modular human brain, with a vocabulary of logical forms underlying our acquisition of music and language, then the newly born child is like a computer operating system, ready to take in, cull, organize, and improvise on the stimuli bombarding it. As the child ages and brain matures, its baby talk is transformed into one of the many culturally defined human languages and specific musical genres. As a conduit for human emotions and accumulated collective wisdom before written language, music would have been the ideal medium. We can imagine that powerful lyrics set to music were already being performed by the shamanistic leaders of ceremonies inside the Stone Age caves.
Music, like alcohol, can also arouse sexual passion. As Charles Darwin remarked a century and a half ago in his Descent of Man: “All these facts with respect to music and impassioned speech become intelligible to a certain extent, if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half human ancestors, during the season of courtship.” The biological foundation for Darwin’s assertion may find confirmation in the genetic and neural blueprint of our brains, especially the hypothalamus of the limbic system. A colleague of mine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Andrew Newberg, and his former associate Eugene D’Aquili have begun to elucidate how the hypothalamus responds to and coordinates the rhythms of the body, using the noninvasive technique of SPECT. They point out that sexual pleasure, too, is rhythmic at its core and under the control of the hypothalamus.
Following Newberg and D’Aquili’s lead, we can make a case for religion’s being a part of the biocultural heritage that we have received from the Stone Age. The prevalence of religion in cultures around the world today and in the past implies that the human brain is primed to acknowledge a power greater than itself. After all, the unconscious and conscious workings of our brains, as well as the forces of nature themselves, are invisible and might be controlled by agencies beyond our comprehension. In a mysterious world, inhabited by all kinds of fabulous creatures real and imagined, human
s needed a way to navigate around the dangers and invoke any beneficent powers. Given the fluid, integrative capacity of the human brain, it reaches out for explanations of these mysteries. We first turn to authority figures—our parents and teachers, among others—but for many the ultimate answer comes from a god.
Newberg and D’Aquili investigated the religious propensity of the human brain by SPECT monitoring the “mystical states” of Tibetan monks and Catholic nuns. They hypothesize that the hypothalamus can be put into overdrive by intense inward concentration, as well as by the mind-altering effects brought on by an alcoholic beverage, a hard-driving melody, frenetic spinning like a Sufi worshipper, or a sexual orgasm. First, one might experience ecstasy from the rush of neurotransmitters along the activated neural pathways. Then, as the hippocampus applies the brakes, as it were, to keep the organism from collapsing from exhaustion, one particular area of the cortex kicks in. The researchers note a marked inhibitory response in the right posterior inferior parietal lobule (the area of our cortex behind and a little above our right ear), which they believe gives us our sense of separation from the physical world. If that boundary is blurred by impulses from the hypothalamus as it tries to offset an emotional high, Newberg and D’Aquili claim, one will experience, like the monks and nuns in the experiment, a sense of oneness and absorption into a unitary being.
It is a huge leap from SPECT scans of the parietal lobe to unveiling the neural and cultural complexity of a mystical state. Yet, based on the available scientific data, Newberg and D’Aquili have begun to make sense of the give and take between the primitive nervous system—dominated by emotions and rhythms—and the brain’s overlying cortex, which mediates consciousness and symbolic thought. Future investigations will likely uncover many more pathways of interconnectivity and neurotransmitter release, showing how the modern human brain is turned on or off by alcohol, sex, music, and religion, either separately or in combination with one another.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James argued that nearly every human being has experienced a religious impulse. James focused on those individuals—the mystics, seers, and prophets, as well as many artists, musicians, and writers—who have gone through a transforming experience to become “twice-born.” James went on to make the broader claim that “the sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature.” Stone Age shamans probably belonged to the same family of the regenerated.
WHAT NEXT?
Our dueling fascination and consternation with alcoholic beverages will surely continue. Despite their dangerously addictive potential, they have been sanctioned by tradition, just as music and religion have been. The sorghum beer cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, the chicha cultures of the Americas, and the wine cultures of the Middle East and Asia all have roots stretching back millennia. It could be argued, however, that any fermented beverage culture must tread a fine line between harnessing the benefits of alcohol and avoiding its damaging effects.
From a very positive perspective, a mind-altering fermented beverage holds out the promise of individual and cultural renewal by encouraging and nourishing creativity and innovation of unusually imaginative individuals—“shamanistic spirits”—who are able to transcend traditions and think outside the box. Intriguingly, the Latin root for spirit may derive from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to blow,” which some linguists suggest should be understood in the sense of “to play a flute.” Could this word, which also connotes the invisible workings of the human mind, be a holdover from the time that our ancestors played flutes, spurred on by fermented beverages, at Geissenklösterle and Isturitz in Europe, Jiahu in China, Caral in Peru, Pecos in New Mexico, and elsewhere?
My approach to alcoholic beverages and human culture differs dramatically from deterministic views of our biocultural past, which emphasize environmental, economic, or utilitarian causes for social transformations. I envision a more open-ended process in which the “pleasure cascade” in humans was activated by innovative ideas and discoveries, helped along by the consumption of an alcoholic beverage. By altering normal consciousness, humans envisioned new ways of symbolically representing the world around them, whether in art, music, poetry, the clothes and jewelry they wore, or rational explanations of how the world worked, which owed much to serendipitous insights and seemingly accidental events.
Fermented beverages played a direct role in both military conquest and the transfer of culture and technology from one area to another. The wine trade was one of the principal incentives for the Phoenicians, and later the Greeks and Romans, to expand their influence in the Mediterranean. Where wine went, other cultural elements eventually followed, even where another fermented beverage had long held sway. The earliest alphabetic inscriptions in Greek, which was derived from Phoenician, were poetic compositions on wine vessels. The Celts in Europe might have eschewed wine at first, but after they had imported some of the most stupendous Greek and Etruscan bronze vessels for their Nordic grog, they were gradually won over to wine and the more “civilized” ways of the south. Wherever we look on Earth, peoples were often first drawn to the cultures of their more technologically advanced neighbors or colonizing powers by the fermented beverages that the latter drank. The European explorers of the so-called Age of Discovery from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century were only one of the most recent examples: their ships were stocked with rum and sherry, which they traded to African chieftains for spices and slaves.
From this perspective, the Chinese, who were technologically in advance of so many other peoples, might well have preempted the Europeans as conquerors of the New World. Political and military prowess depended only partly on natural resources and what plants and animals were available to be domesticated, as Jared Diamond contends in Guns, Germs and Steel; rather, once a people had achieved a certain level of development, their future success depended on the myriad contingent factors of history and culture. When the Ming Dynasty gave up on its ambitious plans of maritime trade in the fifteenth century A.D., the world was left wide open for the Europeans, who had obtained most of their knowledge and technology from Asia, to become its rulers.
As archaeological and biomolecular investigations advance, we can expect to learn much more about our species’ special relationship with fermented beverages. The consumption of alcohol in some regions about which we currently know little or nothing—including New Guinea, India, sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and the Pacific islands—will be investigated and possibly filled in. We may at last know whether the North American and Australian native peoples truly lacked fermented beverages or, more likely, concocted some of their own from a sweet fruit, tree resin, or other plant source. We should eventually be able to trace the movement of domesticated plants and ideas about beverage making across central Asia.
We can also anticipate many new insights about how alcohol affects the human body and brain. Because we are biological products of our past—more than 99 percent of which took place during the Palaeolithic period—many of the dietary ills of modern society, including obesity, diabetes, and alcohol and drug addiction, can be traced to the disparity between this Palaeolithic heritage and our modern lifestyles. Our bodies and brains are adapted to the moderate consumption of food and drink, which we inherited from the Stone Age; so when we overindulge in a fermented beverage, we suffer the physiological and psychological consequences.
Much more will also be learned about early plant domestication. The Eurasian grape was the first fruit to have its DNA fully sequenced, and the Eurasian grape was chosen because of our research that showed how early it had likely been domesticated for large-scale winemaking. Genetic microarrays, which enable thousands of genes to be tested at one time, will speed up the process of distinguishing between domesticated and wild traits in other species of plants.
Finally, we can look forward to many more re-creations of ancient beverages and new taste sensations, based on the biomolecular archa
eological evidence. Bringing these delectable ancient beverages back to life transports us to an ancient time and teaches us more about the earliest methods of natural product fermentation. After a recent trip to Peru, where I observed (and tasted) traditional fermented beverages made from all manner of vegetables, fruit, and cereals—including purple, yellow and white maizes, quinoa, pepper-tree berries, freeze-dried potatoes, cornstalk juice, manioc, peanuts, and mesquite pods—the prospects for re-creating more ancient drinks appear very bright.
My synthetic vision of our species and its relationship to alcoholic beverages may or may not take hold in the academic and popular imagination, and we may not find conclusive evidence to show how much human cultures owe to these drinks. I am encouraged, however, by the ever more sensitive tools now available to biomolecular archaeologists seeking clues to our biological and cultural heritage.
Prehistory teaches us to persevere in our quest for knowledge. Twenty-six thousand years ago at Dolní Věstonice and the nearby site of Pavlov in the modern Czech Republic, humans made the earliest known fired-clay objects on Earth: naked female figurines (“Venuses”) and animal figurines representing bears, lions, and foxes. The figurines were made the same way that they would be today—by mixing the clay with a temper (powdered bone in this instance) and firing it in a kiln. The people at these sites also adorned their bodies with ocher and beads made from carved mammoth bones, the teeth of arctic foxes, and shells. They wove grasses and other fibers into the first clothes, as revealed by the distinctive impressions left on clay. These finds gleam like a light in the darkness of the Palaeolithic period and then disappear. The art and bodily ornament endured, but the truly innovative element of their culture—making an artificial product from clay—was lost and would not be rediscovered until thousands of years later in East Asia. Similarly, I believe that Pliny the Elder’s dictum—in vino veritas (in wine there is truth)—will ultimately prevail in showing how our species’ intimate relationship with fermented beverages over millions of years has, in large measure, made us what we are today.
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