Alcohol interferes with the brain’s communication pathways and can affect the way the brain looks and works. Alcohol makes it harder for the brain areas controlling balance, memory, speech, and judgement to connect. This results in a higher likelihood of injuries, impaired use of a motorized vehicle, and other negative outcomes.
Speech: Becomes slurred and inarticulate as consumption increases.
Vision: Both depth perception and peripheral vision are affected by alcohol use.
Hearing: Hearing also diminishes. That is the reason at an event the volume of speech rises, as hearing diminishes.
Memory Impairments: Alcohol can have a particular disruptive effect on human memory. 1) Encoding – storing information in short-term memory banks. 2) Consolidation – transferring and integrating the information to long-term memory in a lasting form; and 3) Retrieval – the retrieval of the information from long term memory banks.
Blackouts: It is not a question of not remembering – there is no memory to retrieve. Alcohol impairs the encoding so the information was never transferred to the Long-term memory banks. At an event where people are drinking – some seem to repeat the same story over and over again – with no memory of having done so. If it is not transferred within a few minutes it is lost.
Passing Out: Alcohol is a depressant that impacts the whole body, including the central nervous system (the brain), cardiovascular system (the heart), and respiratory system (the lungs and breathing). When someone drinks too much alcohol, or too quickly, it can overwhelm or suppress the healthy performance of these systems. Essentially the individual has anaesthetised their brain. A person can die from alcohol poisoning if their respiratory system (breathing) shuts down. This is a very dangerous situation and the person may die of alcohol poisoning (overdose).