What Happens to Your Brain When You Drink with Friends?

Newswise — EL PASO, Texas (Aug. 6, 2024) – Grab a drink with friends at happy hour and you’re likely to feel chatty, friendly and upbeat. But grab a drink alone and you may experience feelings of depression.

Researchers think they now know why this happens. “Social settings influence how individuals react to alcohol, yet there is no mechanistic study on how and why this occurs,” said Kyung-An Han, Ph.D.

, a biologist at The University of Texas at El Paso who uses fruit flies to study alcoholism. Now, Han and a team of UTEP faculty and students have taken a key step in understanding the neurobiological process behind social drinking and how it boosts feelings of euphoria. Their new study , published in a recent issue of the journal Addiction Biology, pinpoints the region of the brain that is stimulated by social drinking and may lead to a better understanding of how humans become vulnerable to Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), a disease that affected nearly 29.

5 million people just this past year, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Turns out that tipsy fruit flies aren’t that different from intoxicated humans. Although they might seem like an unconventional choice from which to derive knowledge about human behavior, these insects share about 75% of the same genes that cause human diseases, Han explained.

Using fruit flies, Han and her team sought to demonstrate that ethanol, the alcohol in drinks, causes different reactions in solitary ve.