Angry kya? Blame it on alcohol
Just two glasses of vodka can trigger changes in the brain region linked to aggression, say scientists who used MRI scans to understand why people become violent after consuming alcohol. According to most theories, alcohol-related aggression is caused by changes in the prefrontal cortex. However, there is a lack of substantial neuroimaging evidence to substantiate these ideas.
For the study led by Thomas Denson of the University of New South Wales in Australia, researchers recruited fifty healthy young men.
The participants were either given two drinks containing vodka, or placebo drinks without any alcohol. While lying in an MRI scanner, the participants then had to compete in a task which has regularly been used over the past 50 years to observe levels of aggression in response to provocation.
The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allowed the researchers to see which areas of the brain were triggered when the task was performed. They could also compare the difference in scans between participants who had consumed alcohol and those who had not.
Being provoked was found to have no influence on participants’ neural responses. However, when behaving aggressively, there was a dip in activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brains of those who had consumed alcoholic drinks.