Dude, where’s my metaconsciousness?

“Lost in the sauce.”

I have to admit I was taken with the opening sentence of this 2009 study published in Psychological Sciences: “Alcohol consumption alters consciousness in ways that make drinking both alluring and hazardous.”

Indeed it does. There’s no improving on that direct statement about the basic paradox presented by booze: Like so many pleasures, it is both seductive and dangerous. I was further intrigued by the prospects held out by the abstract, which promised “a rigorous examination of the effects of alcohol on experiential consciousness and metaconsciousness.” After all, we have come a long ways from the 50s, when alcohol was seen in Freudian terms, as a way of releasing tension, steam-engine style.

The study, by Michael A. Sayette and Erik D. Reichle of the University of Pittsburgh in Santa Barbara, along with Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara, walks us through the salient recent theories, including the alcohol-myopia theory that gained a foothold in the 90s. In this theory, alcohol “reduces processing capacity so that a great proportion of this capacity has to be devoted to the demands of immediate, ongoing activity.” Like remaining upright, or inserting a key in the lock of a door. It also means that alcohol consciousness is precarious. The pissed-off office worker who comes home to drink may relieve his worries “if he is distracted by television, but he may ‘cry in his beer’ if no such distraction is available.”

One of the alluring and hazardous affects of alcohol is its tendency to cause what the study authors meticulously refer to scientifically as: zoning out. That is to say, episodes of mind wandering.

Enjoy drinking while you read? Listen to this: “Participants who drank alcohol were mind-wandering without awareness of doing so about 25% of the time that they were engaged in the reading task. This frequency was more than double that for participants in the placebo condition.”

The study—“Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering?”—investigated “the effect of alcohol on both the occurrence of mind wandering and the capacity to notice that one’s mind has wandered.” The psychologists gathered 50 men between 21 and 35, put them in a lab, and then split them into a control group and test group. The participants entered the “drink-mixing room where a research was waiting with a tray containing a chilled vodka bottle, a bottle of chilled cranberry-juice cocktail (Ocean Spray), a glass, a graduate cylinder, and a beaker.”

Participants are never in short supply for this kind of clinical study. For half the group, the bottle contained 100-proof Smirnoff. The placebo group got flattened tonic water in a glass pre-slimed with vodka, and were later given fake blood-alcohol test results to further the illusion that they’d had a little alcohol. The drinking participants achieved a mean blood alcohol level of 0.067. Participants in the placebo group received a bogus reading of 0.045, which is the “highest credible reading for deceived participants.”

How did the researchers know if the drinkers were zoning out? They asked. But first, they set them to work reading the first five chapters of War and Peace on a computer. The experimenters asked each participant if they had read War and Peace, in whole or in part, before the experiment, and “all indicated that they had not.” (Men aged 21 to 35, recall.) Their task was to read the first 34 pages of the book, or read for 30 minutes, whichever came first. Before starting, the researchers drilled them on the technical description of zoning out: “At some point during reading, you realize that you have no idea what you just read.”

That’s it in a nutshell, and as we all know, you don’t have to be drunk to experience that effect—but it helps. We have all been witness to the drunk who “loses the thread” of his or her monologue and heads off in another linguistic direction altogether, without apparently noticing the shift. The researchers asked participants to hit a special key, helpfully marked “ZO,” when they noticed during reading that they had zoned out. And they used an additional probe measure, interrupting the readers with a tone and asking them if their mind was wandering or concentrated on the text at that moment. At the end of the session, both groups took a 20-question true/false test on what they had read.

So, what were the differences? Both the placebo group and the drinking group spend about the same amount of time reading, and scored roughly the same on the reading comprehension test. No significant differences in reading rates or immediate retention. And when the researchers compared the first, self-reported measure of mind wandering, the two groups were also “similar in the frequency with which they caught themselves zoning out.”

The big difference showed up when researchers compared the frequency of mind wandering as measured by the arbitrary prompts. In that case, the drinkers zoned out twice as often, but were less likely to catch themselves at it. What the drinkers appeared to be sacrificing was a significant degree of meta-awareness, the act of “thinking about thinking.”

So, when they got probed, what were the drinkers thinking about instead of War and Peace? According to the authors, “alcohol seemed to particularly increase distraction related to sensory states, such as hunger, thirst, and other consummatory motives.” One might be tempted to call them “mammalian motives,” in the sense that alcohol intoxication sometimes reduces drinkers to back-brain, lower-order, fight-or-flight responses not highly compatible with meta-cognition.

This is not exactly a groundbreaking study, it’s fair to say. But it does point up the fact that only a few ounces of alcohol can induce episodes of mind wandering which are not detected by the drinker—mini-blackouts, in a manner of speaking.

Although a reduction in working memory capacity is part of the answer, it is not the whole story. What else fuels this “alcohol myopia” is unclear, but the authors suggest that their findings represent the first practical demonstration that “alcohol disrupts individuals’ meta-awareness of the current contents of thought.” Or, as a heavy drinker might be prone to put it, “Now where was I?”

Graphics Credit: http://www.pnas.org/

An Interview With Research Psychologist Vaughan Bell

An expert on abnormal brain function talks about drugs, hallucinations, and addiction.

Vaughan Bell gets around. The multifaceted clinical and research psychologist, currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, is, in fact, down in Colombia right now. He arrived in the country to teach clinical psychiatry at Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl and the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, where he remains an honorary professor, but right now he works for Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as mental health coordinator for Colombia, which means he is quite frequently off in the jungle, doing good work under very bad conditions. Bell has written for numerous scientific journals, including Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Psychiatry Research, and Cortex. He has also written for Slate, The Guardian, Scientific American, and is a contributing editor at Wired. The New York Times ran a fascinating profile of Bell’s work on debunking theories about the Internet as a cause of addiction and psychosis. He is well known online for his contributions to the Mind Hacks blog, which covers unusual and intriguing findings in neuroscience and psychology. He is also working on The Enchanted Window: How Hallucinations Reveal the Hidden Workings of the Mind and Brain, a book for Penguin UK.


Q. You’ve been looking into abnormal brain states of late: delusions, hallucinations, and dissociative disorders.  Do drugs, madness, brain injuries, and religious experiences have anything in common? Is there an underlying cause for seeing or experiencing things that aren’t there?

Vaughan Bell: Apart from involving the brain, often not. Unusual perceptions occur because the normal processes that allow us to generate sensory impressions of the world become distorted. For example, the idea that we see the world as it is, is a bit of a myth, because we experience things that aren’t there all the time. The eye allows light to fall on the retina, two flat areas of photoreceptor cells which provide only patchy and poor resolution coverage of the visual field, and yet we have a very rich visual experience. The brain is filling in the rest. In your blind spots, you receive no visual information and yet we don’t have two black spots in our vision because we ‘hallucinate’ the best guess visual experience.

These are not usually considered hallucinations because the experience remains stable and predictable but these same processes, with just slight instabilities, can lead to spectacular hallucinatory states – such as Charles Bonnet syndrome –where damage to the retina leads to visions of monkeys, rabbits and little men. In other words, there are as many causes for hallucinations as there are causes for our perception of reality. If the same processes are affected through drugs, brain damage, trance states, stress or simply expectation, we can say that a particular experience has a similar basis but we have to think of the interaction to understand them fully. Trying to explain experiences solely by the brain, mind or environment makes little sense.

Q: You’ve experimented with “the vine”—ayahuasca, a powerful South American hallucinogenic plant that contains DMT. You obviously lived to tell about it. Did you see any transdimensional machine elves?

Bell: There were no transdimensional machine elves, although the whole experience was quite striking. I was kindly invited to take part in the ceremony by a chap called Romualdo, a Uitito taita (shaman), who I happened to meet in a conference about indigenous culture and I was very grateful for the opportunity.

I suspect the experience of meeting what McKenna called the "machine elves" is more prominent when pure DMT is smoked which gives a more concentrated acute dose. The traditional process of taking ayahuasca, known as yagé in Colombia, involves drinking a potion made from the vine until you start puking. To get a fair dose you need to repeat this process several times, so the absorption is much slower. I managed three or four drink – puke cycles and the psychedelic effects were prominent although I never lost track of reality. I was, however, very struck by the appearance of classic Kluver form constants, geometric patterns that are probably caused by the drug affecting the visual neurons that deal with basic perceptual process (e.g. line detection).

Q. As a research psychologist, you have been critical of the disease model of addiction for being both too simplistic about mind and behavior, and too all-encompassing to be credible. In an article for Slate, you wrote: "Despite the scientific implausibility of the same disease—addiction—underlying both damaging heroin use and overenthusiasm for World of Warcraft, the concept has run wild in the popular imagination. Our enthusiasm for labeling new forms of addictions seems to have arisen from a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy for the miserable." How should we view addiction, and how should we be dealing with it?

Bell: I think we should view addiction as an over-applied label that is distracting us from the fact that not everyone’s difficulties with unhelpful repetitive behavior can be understood and treated in the same way. Often compulsive behaviors do have shared factors. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, impulse control disorders (like pathological gambling or compulsive stealing) and drug addictions are all known to have shared similar behavioral, neurological and genetic features but that does not mean that each disorder is essentially the same.

The idea that playing too many computer games or compulsive use of the Internet is an addiction like any other is really obscuring the fact that different compulsive behaviors also have many different components. It would be like saying that all "mood disorders" are essentially the same—it would neither be scientifically nor clinically helpful and would cause more confusion than insight. This is the situation we have with addiction at the moment.

Q. You’ve been living and working in South America for some time now. How has the drug trade and the drug war changed that part of the world, in your own experience?

Bell: If you don’t mind, I’m going to skip this question. The drug trade is interwoven with the conflict in Colombia and myself and my colleagues in Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) work in areas where the fighting is live and ongoing. One of the things that allows us to do our work in areas controlled by armed groups is that we are a neutral organization solely concerned with providing medical care without getting involved in the politics behind the conflict. Of course, like everyone else, I have a view, but in case it affects either our access to the people we’re trying to treat or the security of our teams in the field, I’ll keep it to myself when I’m mentioned alongside the organization.

Graphics Credit:  http://news.softpedia.com/