Your Brain Makes You Want to Order Drink After Drink

Stop us if you've heard this one before.

You're tired and low-key at work, but a colleague convinces you to make a stop at happy hour at the end of the day anyway, "just for one drink" to blow off steam or gossip about the possible affairs brewing between your fellow employees. The next thing you know, you're on your fourth Pimm's Cup, you're telling Brandi from accounting all your darkest secrets, and some guy you met at the end of the bar is lining up tequila shots for everyone. What happened?, you wonder as you plow through a late-night burrito. You had such strong conviction when you said you really just wanted a quick pint and then a quiet night in.

Well, blame your brain. Because your inability to resist that second drink has a lot to do with the way we're wired, according to a new study from Texas A&M University.

The research, published in the August 19 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, provides new insight into how addiction works—particularly in regards to alcohol consumption—and the role of brain activity in encouraging booze-seeking behaviors.

The study found that drinking alcohol can actually alter the structure and function of neurons that are found in the dorsomedial striatum, the area of your brain that controls motivational and reward systems. When you sip on your glass of Chardonnay or tumbler of whiskey-soda, the shape of these "go neurons" shifts, urging you to order another round and keep up the buzz. Binge-drinking continues to activate these D1 (dopamine) neurons leading people who are susceptible to alcohol abuse to continue drinking past the point of safety or pleasantness. It's a vicious cycle wherein your brain's "yes" mechanism is more easily activated, and the more you drink, the more susceptible you are to its motivational powers.

"If these neurons are excited, you will want to drink alcohol," says Jun Wang, one of the study's co-authors and an assistant professor in the neuroscience and experimental therapeutics at the Texas A&M College of Medicine said in a statement. "You'll have a craving."

Despite the enormous prevalence of alcoholism—some 17.6 million Americans, or one in 12 adults, suffers from the condition—medical professionals have yet to come up with solutions to alcohol abuse that have consistent success rates.

Texas A&M's new research may shed light on why this is the case. "We found that alcohol consumption produces a long-lasting enhancement of channel activity and persistent alterations of neuronal morphology in a part of the brain (DMS) that controls alcohol-drinking behaviors," the study authors write. "Furthermore, we show that these alterations occur only in a subpopulation of neurons that positively control reward and reinforcement of drugs of abuse."

So what's the takeaway? Well, this revelation could be the first step toward a new type of medication that blocks D1 receptors and breaks the aforementioned neuronal cycle that feeds into alcohol abuse.

"My ultimate goal is to understand how the addicted brain works," Wang says, "and once we do, one day, we'll be able to suppress the craving for another round of drinks and ultimately, stop the cycle of alcoholism."

So if you're a moderate drinker who occasionally goes overboard, this may not change much about your love of going ape on a pitcher of piña coladas. But with alcohol abuse the third leading preventable cause of death in the US, with more than 88,000 alcohol-related deaths annually, this could be a step toward a safer world for those who are never able to stop at one drink.