Mizzou researcher figures out why booze makes you dumb
Over the holiday weekend, when you’ve had too many fuzzy navels in the heat and you start to think it’s a great idea to stumble into your car and drive to your ex’s house unannounced to finally get closure, stop and try to remember what Mizzou researcher Bruce Bartholow discovered recently: Booze weakens the brain signal that tells you that you’re being dumb, making you lose self-control.
Bartholow, an associate professor of psychology, explains that when you do stupid things while wasted, it’s not that you’re unaware that what you’re doing is idiotic, it’s that you just don’t give a damn.
“Our study isn’t the first to show that alcohol reduces this alarm signal, but contrary to previous studies, our study shows that alcohol doesn’t reduce your awareness of mistakes — it reduces how much you care about making those mistakes,” Bartholow said in a news release.
