The Cost of Alcohol Abuse • Alcohol is a dangerous substance that can have negative consequences for both the individual and society. • There is a cost to alcohol abuse, both in terms of economic impact and in terms of health care costs. Transcript: Speaker 1 And that’s almost certainly an underestimate because of black markets and under reporting. And you may have not got the memo yet about masturbation. It doesn’t make you go blind. Don’t worry about it. What does make you go blind is alcohol. Im shaseegermeiser, i can make you go blind. So its very alcohol is very damaging physiologically. It causes liver damage. It raises your cancer. From a medical perspective, there’s really no upside to alcohol. And you can forget about all this french paradox clusterall stuff. It’s it’s bad for you. From a biomedical perspective, alcohol is bad for you. It’s a dangerous substance. In the tiny country that i live in now, about the size of a california, two thousand 14 its estimated that the economic impact of alcohol abuse was 14 point six billion dollars. That’s probably canadian dollars. That’s like ten dollars us. But still, ive. I a 14 thousand 800 deaths, 87 hundred hospital missions. All these years of productive life lost. If this is an evolutionary mistake, it’s an incredibly costly evolutionary mistake. It doesn’t make sense that there would not be some pressure to fix this if all it was was a cost. Now, sometimes it is the case that evolution can’t fix something. (Time 0:06:45)
El consumo de alcohol probablemente se mantiene porque provee una ventaja adaptativa Transcript: Speaker 1 Spread. If this was really only a problem, if there were only costs involved with alcohol, you would expect both this gean complex and this cultural idea of just prohibiting alcohol to spread Very quickly. And it hasn’t. So this is the puzzle. This is why alcohol is puzzling to someone who looks at human behavior through an evolutionary lens. We have these very real costs, social physiological costs. We have both genetic and cultural evolutionary solutions to these costs that haven’t taken off. The only conclusion you can come to if you’re looking at this through an evolutionary lens, is that there are benefits on the other side. There’s something that is on the other side of the equation that’s keeping our taste for alcohol both or jean pool and anaricultural repertoirs. So that’s what we got to look at, is what the benefits might be. What it can’t but the benefits can’t be is pleasure or happiness. The answer can’t be, it makes us feel good, cause evolution doesn’t care whether we feel good or not. The answer’s got to be something adaptive, something inthe currency that evolution works in. So so we have to think about what the potential adaptive and offensive alcohol are. To think about that, we have to think about our particular ecological niche. (Time 0:11:43)
2min adaptación alcohol evolución homo_sapiens
2min adaptación alcohol evolución homo_sapiens
The Evolution of Alcohol Consumption Transcript: Speaker 1 So so we have to think about what the potential adaptive and offensive alcohol are. To think about that, we have to think about our particular ecological niche. So human beings are primates, but we’re really weird primateswer we’re very our life styles and everything about us is very different from our closest relatives. I want to focus on two things in particular. One of them is our dependence on technology, tool sets, and therefore innovation. We are completely human beings, or completely dependent technology, so much so that one of the most ancient technologies is fire. (Time 0:12:51)
El alcohol como tecnología que permite disminuir la rigidez cognitiva del adulto. Transcript: Speaker 1 Focus. So evolutions this problem. We can’t remain like children. Our whole lives. We have to become adults. We have to be able to tie our shoes and get to school on time andnd do the things that adults do. But it comes at a cost. It comes at the cost of this, this kind of creativity we have when we’r four year olds. What would be awesome is if we could remain adults, with all the capabilities we have as adults, all the knowledge that we have as adults, but every once in a while, turn back the clock A bit and try to think like a four year old again. So to do that, you’d have to undo that maturation of the prefernal cortex, at least temporarily. You could down regulate it, for instance. So one way you could do this is a trans cranial magnet. And people, people have done this. Ou sap the prefernal cortex with ta magnet, take it off line temporarily, and people do better at lateral thinking tasks. Theygt theyd go back up to a kind of where kids are in the performance on these tasks. So this is great. This shows you that the p f c is the problem, right? It’s what’s getting in the way of our creativity. The problem is this is a relatively recent technology, is bulky, expensive. If you showed up at a party with this, they wouldn’t let you in. Bra. So what would be better than the transgranal magnet is a technology that’s a little more subtle, lower te you can make it out of anything. It’s easy to discover. It pares well with food. Maybe you see where i’m going a alcohol is is that technology. Alcohol is our lotec transcranial magnet that can take out the p f c. (Time 0:16:32)
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The Effect of Prohibition on Innovation • Prohibition caused a decrease in innovation, and it took about three years for it to recover. • Social drinking seems to be related to group innovation. Transcript: Speaker 1 Now in terms of direct evidence of this, there’s not a whole lot right now. An this is a nice study, i like, a by andrews looking at correlation. He’s taking advantage as an economist, and he took advantage of this great natural experiment, american prohibition. So we tended to think of prohibition as something that happened all at once at the federal level, just suddenly no one in america could drink. And it wasn’t like that at all. It actually a really long time to impose prohibition. And it was imposed piecemeal at the county level. So he was able to look at county level data. And what he was looking at was patent applications as a proxy for innovation. And he could look at patent applications at the county level. And what he is that when you impose prohibition on a county, patent applications plunge. Collective innovation plunges, and then it slowly recovers. It took about three years to get back to pre prohibition levels. He his hypothesis is spekiasies. This is why that happened. So basically, prohibition comes in, you can’t drink socially any more. Innovation goes down, and it goes down until people figure out to work around. And the work around was figuring out a new way to drink socially. So social drinking seems to be related to innovation, a group innovation, in this sense. (Time 0:19:53)
El alcohol nos ayuda a confiar Transcript: Speaker 1 Alcohol. Another strange thing about us, compared to other primates, is that we are communal. We’re dependent on other people in a way that no other primate is. And to get anything useful done, we need to trust one another. We need to engage in long term co operative tasks that re trust. And when we embark upon these tasks, we run into various types of co operation dilemmas. And these go under different types of names. You prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons. They have the same structure though you get the best pay off if you trust and operate. The problem is, and this is a crucial part of the structure of these dilemmas, i don’t know in advance whether or not you’re going to co operate with me. And if you don’t co operate, if you defect, as economists put it, im screwed. I get zero. You get a great pay off. And so for a rational, self interested agent in a prisoner’s dilemma game, the only strategy is to defect. So everyone defects, and everybody gets that kind of bummer mutual defection outcome. In real life, people solve this all the time. We were constantly solving prisoners dilemmas in our real life. And we do because we are not rational, self interested agents. We’re emotionaland we use emotions to help u solve these dilemmas. We have emotions like honor, like loyalty, like trust, that allow us, that bind us to each other in a certain way that prevent effections from happening. Som ons, the economist robert frank, has a great book called passions within reason, where he explains that these love and honor, in these things, they’re approximately irrational. So inyour actual psychology, they are not rational, but they have this kind of long term rationality on an evolutionary scale. So so we these emotions. And because emotions help us co operate, we use them as cues to know who’s a good co operator and who’s not. So when we’re deciding whether not to trust some one, we look at their emotional expressions. This is the safety net we have in co operation. I meet you and you genuinely are happy to meet you. How do i know you’re youre genuinely happy? Ecause you have that smile on the left and not the one on the right. The left one is a duche smile, completely different muscle system, not typically under voluntary control. That’s the smile you make when you’re serving people in a restaurant. You have to be nice to them. We like the o the left. We don’t like the one on the right. So we use emotional displays as a way to know whether or not to trust people. Ti this opens up the possible risk, though, that people could be faking it. The soft spot here, again, is e prefer on cortex. In order to lie, in order to cheat. In order to calculate, you need your prefernal cortex in top shapea, lying is very difficult cotively, right? You have to keeptrat in your mind both what’s true and what’s what you’re telling the person. You have to suppress emotions that have to do with the false thing that you’re not telling them about. Is you need your p pc top shape. What’s also interesting is when the p f c is in top shape, we’re not as good at detecting lies. And this seems to be because we look, when we’re consciously focusing on detecting lies, we’re not very good at it. We look at the wrong things. It’s only when we’re relax that we actually take in more information. So let’s target the prefernal cortex with what with our good old friend alcoholit down regulates the prefernal cortex. It makes us heart it makes it harder for us to lie. It makes us easier for us to detect lies. And it’s also simultaneously boosting some hormons like seratonan that make us less likely to cheat. So it’s its enhancing these kind of pro social hormones in human beings. So this is why, a, you know, when people, potentially hostile adults meet and have to come to some kind of agreement, they shake hands, and they’re showing, i’m not carrying a weapon. When you meet with someone and you do a couple of shots, you’re saying, i no longer have a preferrant cortex. I am cognitively disarming and putting my preferant cortex on the table. You can trust me. This is why, from ancient china to ancient greece, alcohol is always at the centre of a banquet of treaty s, anything where you have people with potentially differing interests having To agree on something. (Time 0:21:51)
alcohol confianza
Por qué el alcohol es el rey de los intoxicantes Transcript: Speaker 1 Yes, o, in the book, i do discuss other intoxicants, and i argue that there’s a reason that alcohol is tha i call the king of intoxicants. If you gave a engineer, a cultural engineering team, the task of coming up with the substance, and you gave them designed specks, we wanted to be easy to make out of it, anything. It should have predictable effects, short half life, predictable across individuals, they would probably come up with alcohol. So if you look at canabas, canabas has nages. It doesn’t lead to violence. A, it’s not physically indictive. It’s possibly psychologically idictive, not physically a it’s physiologically less harmful than alcohol, but it has wildly varying effects on individuals. So i have friends and friends in grad school here in the bar who would smoke and then go out dancing, which is inconceivable to be. So when i smoke catavas, i get really paranoid, and then i fall asleep. So it’s not a social drug for me. You can’t, your your social go to drug can’t be something that has such variable effects people. And it’s also a hard to dose. If you don’t know how to hold it in your lungs, you don’t get the same dose. Whereas when we’re all sipping that beer or the georgian wine, we know what we’re getting and we know, and it gets cleared from our body very quickly, because we have this machinery that’s Ten million years old to grab that and all break it down and get it out of our bodies as quickly as possible. (Time 0:37:37)
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