Two types of behavior from evolutionary mistakes: hangover (once helpful, not anymore: sugar) and hijack (using for unintended reasons: masturbation)
“The cost of indulgence has to be balanced by specific, targeted benefits.”
“This book argues that, far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.”
“The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication.”
Alcohol is “unchallenged king of intoxicants”: simple molecule, easy to make and consume, storable, precisely doseable, complex but predictable cognitive effects, quickly eliminated from body, pairs with food
Ethanol is produced in ripe fruit by yeast cells and can travel far in the air; smell attracted primates to ripe fruit and therefore high-quality nourishment (unproven theory)
Biologist Robert Dudley’s argument that alcohol makes us feel good because evolutionary it led to a large caloric and nutritional payoff
Fermentation of grain to beer nearly doubles its nutritional and vitamin content; valuable part of otherwise bad diet
Fruit flies seek out fruit with high alcohol content to ward off wasps from colonizing their eggs
“Humans are the only species that deliberately, systematically, and regularly gets drunk.”
“Humans are powerful in groups precisely because we are weak as individuals, pathetically eager to connect with one another, and utterly dependent on the group for survival.”
Precocial vs. altricial birds; born fully equipped and ready to survive vs. blind and fully dependent on parents
Humans’ extreme ecological niche demands us to be creative, cultural, and communal
Brain maturation occurs through “neural pruning” of unnecessary connections; results in greater efficiency and speed but less flexibility
Just as thoughts are an emergent property of neural networks, so are innovations of humanity’s “collective brain” vis a vis culture
Humans are the Labradors of the primate world: “bizarrely tolerant of strangers, open to new experiences, ready to play”
Play allows practice for important adult skills, social hierarchy structures, and trust (dogs wrestling)
“It is virtual youth—a childlike state of kind in an otherwise functional adult—that is the key to cultural innovation.”
Humans have developed tools for temporarily but powerfully enhancing childlike creativity and receptiveness in otherwise fully functional adults: meditation, prayer, chemical substances
Alcohol affects entire body like a “pharmacological hand grenade” compared to scalpels of cocaine and LSD
Compared to other drugs, alcohol quickest and easiest way to neutralize prefrontal cortex and enhance mood
Apollo vs. Dionysus; grim wolves vs. playful Labradors
“Being human requires a careful balancing act between Apollo and Dionysus. We need to be able to tie our shoes, but also be occasionally distracted by the beautiful or interesting or new.”
“Cultures throughout time and across the world implicitly understood that the sober, rational, calculating individual mind is a barrier to social trust.”
Communal intoxication allows us to “cognitively disarm” in the presence of others; handshakes
“Bridal” comes from Old English “bryd ealu” or “bride ale” exchanged between families at wedding
Frederick the Great of Prussia’s 1777 message: “It is disgusting to notice the increase in quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were both his ancestors and officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.”
“Intoxicants—above all alcohol—appear to have been the chemical tool that allowed humans to escape the limits imposed by our ape nature and create social insect-like levels of cooperation.”
“There is considerable anecdotal evidence that, by freeing up individual minds, lubricating the flow of ideas from person to person, and reducing self-consciousness and inhibition, communal alcohol consumption is a key driver of cultural innovation.”
“We might see the ‘spirit world,’ in a modern context, as the wildly diverse, fragmented, technicolor, non-linear landscape of the human brain radically freed of cognitive control.”
Increase of business travel despite videoconferencing related to the puzzle of why we like to get drunk; “Neither makes practical sense unless we discern the cooperation problems to which they are a response”
“Efficiency, the central value of Apollo, is the enemy of disruptive innovation.”
UK study found four variables on reported feelings of closeness with dinner-mates: number of diners (about four seemed optimal), presence of laughter, presence of reminiscences, and consumption of alcohol
“Moderate social drinking brings people together, keeps them connected to their communities, and lubricates the exchange of information and building of networks.”
Mild intoxication makes you physically appear more attractive to others, probably related to becoming more relaxed, confident, unselfconscious, and happy
Michael Ing: “Friendship nullifies the limitations of self and time. It encourages the loss of oneself in another, and heightens an awareness of this other, more communal, self.”
“Human selves do not, in fact, come pre-installed with a mute button, which is precisely why we reach for the bottle or joint.”
“We remain uncomfortable talking about our need for embodied pleasure for its own sake, rather than as a side effect of more respectable, abstract connoisseurship. This is a hang-up that we need to get over.”
“It is our deeply seated, and so typically invisible, mind-body dualism that causes us to systematically, and unfairly, denigrate the role of chemical intoxication in any vision of the good life.”
Charles Baudelaire: “You must always be drunk. Everything depends upon getting drunk, it is all that matters. In order to not feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and pushes you to the ground, you must be drunk, perpetually drunk. Drunk on what? On wine, on poetry or virtue, whatever your taste. But get drunk.”