A year ago, Cheyne Kobzoff's life sucked. Hard. Despite a loving wife, two kids, and a great job as a chef at a local restaurant, the lifelong drinker spent every miserable morning trying to remove the creeping thoughts of self-hatred from his perpetually pounding head. But beyond the emotional damage, Kobzoff's rampant boozing had also caused his belly to balloon into a Santa-like situation. (The beard didn't do him any favors either.)
More precisely, the model assumes people drink to increase positive feelings or decrease negative ones. They’re also motivated by internal rewards such as enhancement of a desired personal emotional state, or by external rewards such as social approval.
This results in all drinking motives falling into one of four categories: enhancement (because it’s exciting), coping (to forget about my worries), social (to celebrate), and conformity (to fit in). Drinkers can be high or low in any number of drinking motives – people are not necessarily one type of drinker or the other.
I rarely mix weed and alcohol—otherwise, I become more silent than a hermit crab floating in space.
But pursuing the high that results from combining the two drugs—known as a "crossfade"—isn't uncommon. Researchers, however, are still delving into the science behind this blissed-out state of mind—and why so many people seek it out.
"Although there was an overall dampening effect of alcohol on the prefrontal cortex, even at a low dose of alcohol we observed a significant positive relationship between dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity and alcohol-related aggression," lead author Thomas Denson, from the University of New South Wales in Australia, said in a statement. "These regions may support different behaviors, such as peace versus aggression, depending on whether a person is sober or intoxicated.
