How Wine Fosters Creativity, Trust and Sociability with Edward Slingerland, Author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

Natalie MacLean
Aug28th

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Introduction

How does alcohol, especially wine, foster our creativity, trustingness, and sociability? What does the “beer before bread” hypothesis suggest about alcohol’s role in the development of civilization? Should there be different minimum drinking ages for wine and beer versus spirits?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I’m chatting with Edward Slingerland, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.

You can find the wines we discussed here.

 

Giveaway

Two of you will win a copy of his terrific book, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.

 

How to Win

To qualify, all you have to do is email me at [email protected] and let me know that you’ve posted a review of the podcast.

It takes less than 30 seconds: On your phone, scroll to the bottom here, where the reviews are, and click on “Tap to Rate.”

After that, scroll down a tiny bit more and click on “Write a Review.” That’s it!

I’ll choose one person randomly from those who contact me.

Good luck!

 

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Join the live-stream video of this conversation on Wednesday at 7 pm eastern on Instagram Live Video, Facebook Live Video or YouTube Live Video.

I’ll be jumping into the comments as we watch it together so that I can answer your questions in real-time.

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Highlights

  • What drew Edward to study the history of drunkenness?
  • What does the “beer before bread” hypothesis suggest about how our desire to drink alcohol led to civilization?
  • Why was ancient beer production so costly?
  • What is the “Asian flushing syndrome,” and why does Edward think it developed?
  • Why does Edward consider the prefrontal cortex to be the enemy of creativity?
  • How have we removed the inherent safety features of alcohol over thousands of years of evolution?
  • Should there be different minimum drinking ages for wine/beer versus spirits?
  • What makes wine the king of intoxicants?
  • How does alcohol affect the prefrontal cortex?
  • When does creativity peak relative to blood alcohol content?

 

Key Takeaways

  • How does alcohol, especially wine, foster our creativity, trustingness, and sociability?
    Edward observes that alcohol stimulates the pro-social chemicals in our body, like serotonin and endorphin, that make us feel expansive and kind of feel good about ourselves and more kindly disposed toward other people. One of the brain regions that it quiets is the prefrontal cortex. He believes that alcohol is a tool we’ve invented when we need to temporarily turn it back down a few notches and get a little bit back to being more like a four or five-year-old in terms of our creativity, trustingness and sociality.
  • What does the “beer before bread” hypothesis suggest about alcohol’s role in the development of civilization?
    As Edward explains, the standard story, until relatively recently, was that humans were hunter-gatherers for most of our history as a species. At some point, we discovered we could cultivate grains, and we settled down and started making bread and other grain products. Then at some point after that, someone left their sourdough starter out a bit too long, and it started to ferment, or we noticed that the grapes that we had picked left in a jar started to ferment, and we discovered alcohol by accident. So the traditional story is that alcohol is a result of an evolutionary or historical accident. But since then, archeologists believe that maybe the story was the other way around. The draw for hunter-gatherers to settle down and cultivate crops was not bread. It was beer. This is the so-called beer before bread hypothesis.
  • Should there be different minimum drinking ages for wine and beer versus spirits?
    Edward observes that once distilled liquors became available on a large scale, the dangers of alcohol in the super potent form became greater because it can overwhelm our system. So we have these mechanisms to detoxify ethanol that we’ve inherited from primate ancestors who started eating fermented, partially fermented fruit on the forest floor. They work at natural fermentation levels. Once you start doing shots of a 90-something percent distilled liquor, it just completely overwhelms your body’s defenses, and you can go from being sober to being really dangerously drunk in 10 or 15 minutes. Edward doesn’t think people should be allowed to drink distilled liquor until well into their 20s.

 

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We don’t question the things that we naturally do. - Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Click to tweet

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Alcohol, in general, is costly economically and physiologically. - Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Click to tweet

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Alcohol is a tool we’ve invented to temporarily get a little bit back to being more like a four or five-year-old in terms of our creativity, trustingness, and sociality. - Edward Slingerland Edward Slingerland Click to tweet

 

About Edward Slingerland

Edward Slingerland is a Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Asian Studies. He is also Director of the Database of Religious History. Dr. Slingerland is the author of several academic monographs and edited volumes, a major translation of the Analects of Confucius, and approximately fifty book chapters, reviews, and articles in top academic journals in a wide range of fields. His first trade book, Trying Not to Try (Crown 2014), ties together insights from early Chinese thought and modern psychological research. His second, Drunk (Little, Brown Spark June 2021), targets the standard scientific view of our taste for intoxicants as an evolutionary accident, arguing instead that alcohol and other drugs have played a crucial role in helping humans to be more creative, trusting, and cooperative.

 

Resources

 

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Transcript

Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 How does alcohol, especially wine, foster our creativity, trustingness, and sociability? What does the beer before bread hypothesis suggest about alcohol’s role in the development of civilization? And should there be different minimum drinking ages for wine and beer versus spirits? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in our chat with Edward Slingerland, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover: What drew Edward to study the history of intoxication. Why ancient beer production was so costly. Why ancient Sumur used up to two thirds of their grain production for beer. What the Asian flushing syndrome is and why Edward thinks it developed. Why Edward considers the prefrontal cortex to be the enemy of creativity. How we remove the inherent safety features of alcohol over thousands of years of evolution. How alcohol affects the prefrontal cortex when creativity peaks relative to blood alcohol content. Why we assume that when we visit, many foreign cultures will be welcomed with some sort of intoxicant. And what makes alcohol, and by extension, wine, the king of intoxicants. Okay, let’s dive in.

Natalie MacLean 00:01:38 Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations? Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started.

Welcome to episode 300. Wait, what? 300? Holy smokes. You know, looking back on this podcast journey since 2018, I am filled with a deep appreciation for all of you. Your support of emails and messages have meant more to me than you know, especially during the long hours of work that go into each episode. Creating this show is no small feat. It takes about 15 to 20 hours to research topics, write scripts, and interview guests for each episode, and there are times when this feels overwhelming I’ve got to be honest with you. But your encouragement keeps me motivated and it reminds me why I started this podcast. I’m not alone in this endeavor. Alexandra Stennett, our sound engineer and editor, Elvie Targum, our social media manager, and Craig Haynes, our script editor, all play crucial roles in bringing each episode to life. Their dedication and skill are invaluable.

You, as a listener, are truly at the heart of this podcast. Your encouragement and the support have turned this from a show into a community. Thank you for being part of this journey, for listening and for caring. Your presence makes all this hard work worthwhile and I’m genuinely grateful for you. Some of my favorite episodes over the years were with winemakers who had an incredible sense of humour, and yet still shared so many great insights into the winemaking process including Charles Back from South Africa, Randall Grahm from California and Thomas Bachelder from Ontario. I also enjoyed the meaty, intellectually buzzy conversations with authors such as Felicity Carter, Susie Barrie and Peter Richards and Karen MacNeil.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:15 I’m proud that we’ve been able to give a platform to important issues in the wine world with our conversations about racism with Tanya Pitts, LGBTQ+ with Theresa Heredia, and sexism with Victoria James. I continue to be amazed at how wine intersects with so many facets of our lives. As we discovered in our chats with Bianca Booker about the art world and wine. Nell McShane Wulfhart on wine and music, and Dina Blikshteyn on wine and artificial intelligence. Most of all, I enjoyed the shows that celebrate the pure pleasure of wine, especially when paired with food. Whether it’s with cheese, with tips from Laura Werlin, vegetarian dishes with Priya Rao and Jennifer Huether, or Fast Food with Vanessa Price. I’ll put links to each of these special episodes in the show notes. And I would love to hear what were your favourite episodes to celebrate the 300th episode? I’m giving away five personally signed copies of my latest book Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation and Drinking Too Much, now a national bestseller. Again, thanks to you.

If you’d like to win a copy, please email me and let me know. I’ll choose five people randomly from those who contact me and announced the winners in a few weeks time. I want to share with you a review for the new audiobook edition of  Wine Witch on Fire. It’s from Mike Welling in Toronto, and he posted it on Audible.com. “The roller coaster of emotions and challenges faced by Natalie through her private, personal and high profile professional life takes on greater Poignancy when Told in Her Own Voice, a thought provoking memoir about overcoming prejudice, deceit and human fragility, and finding the resilience to rebuild a life of purpose, repute and joy. It is even replete with wine tips a wonderful story. Five stars”. Thank you Mike. You can download Wine Witch on Fire and start listening to it immediately on Audible.com, Kobo, Audiobooks.com, Spotify, Google Play, Libro.FM or wherever else you get audiobooks. And by the way, you can get it now for 60% off.  So it’s just eight bucks right now on audiobooks.com until September 23rd. That’s audiobooks.com. If you’ve started listening to it please let me know. I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. I’ll put a link in the show notes to all retailers worldwide for the audiobook, e-book and paperback versions at nataliemaclean.com/300.

Okay. On with the show. All right. Before I introduce our guests, let me just say that two of you are going to win a copy of his terrific book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. All you have to do is email me at [email protected] and let me know that you’d like to win a copy. I’ll pick two people randomly from those who contact me.

Back to our guest. Edward Slingerland is a distinguished university scholar and professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds appointments in the departments of Psychology and Asian Studies. Dr. Slingerland is the author of several academic monographs and edited volumes, a major translation of the Analects of Confucius, and approximately 50 book chapters, reviews and articles in top academic journals in a wide range of fields. His first trade book, Trying Not to Try, ties together insights from early Chinese thought and modern psychological research. His second, Drunk, which we’ll be covering today, targets the standard scientific view of our taste for intoxicants as an evolutionary accident, arguing instead that alcohol and other drugs have played a crucial role in helping humans to be more creative, trusting and cooperative. And he joins us now from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Welcome, Ted. It’s great to have you here with us.

Edward Slingerland 00:08:22 Thanks for having me.

Natalie MacLean 00:08:23 So the history of drunkenness is that’s a big topic. What drew you to the story in the first place?

Edward Slingerland 00:08:29 I just became interested, and I’ve had a long interest in why humans do things that are costly and don’t seem to have a practical point. So I started with religion. So people engage in all sorts of strange practices. They worship invisible beings. They scarify themselves. They sit in on a hard seat on their only day off and listen to a boring sermon. Why do people, why do human beings engage in this behaviour? And it’s especially puzzling when the costly behaviour that doesn’t seem to have a point is universal and ancient.

So we see humans doing this everywhere and throughout history. So this is what earlier academic work I worked a bit on, the evolutionary origins of religion, and it started to occur to me that the human use of chemical intoxicants was similar: costly, ubiquitous, ancient, and kind of begging for an evolutionary explanation. So that’s what got me into it at first.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:28 Did it have anything on a personal level for you in terms of why you were drawn to this subject?

Edward Slingerland 00:09:33 I like that. So I had a personal interest, but yeah, I’m drawn to these kind of I think of them as mysteries hiding in plain sight. So we just assume everywhere we go that will be, you know, visit a foreign culture, you’ll be welcomed in some sort of banquet and intoxicants will be passed around. That should puzzle us more, more than it does given some of the costs of alcohol use. I had a personal interest in it, but it came naturally out of my academic interests.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:00 Okay, why don’t you think we’re puzzled by it? Do we just take it for granted because it’s centuries of tradition?

Edward Slingerland 00:10:06 Yeah, I think that’s it. We’ve just been. It’s like religion. We’ve been doing it forever, everywhere. So we don’t question these things that humans naturally do. But every once in a while, it’s good to step back and put on your evolutionary eyeglasses and look at something that doesn’t seem puzzling, and think about why it might be puzzling, and why we might need to explain it.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:28 Absolutely. I  have to order my evolutionary eyeglasses from Amazon tomorrow.

Edward Slingerland 00:10:32 All right [laughter]. Yes, you can get there on sale. Prime Day.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:35 [laughter] So wine is an ancient beverage. Domesticated grapevines have been cultivated for 11,000 years approximately. How did the desire to make alcohol change the nomadic, wandering existence of people way back then?

Edward Slingerland 00:10:49 So the standard story until relatively recently in archaeology was that humans were hunter gatherers for histories of species. At some point, we discovered we could cultivate grains, and we settled down and started making bread and other grain products. And then at some point after that, someone left their sourdough starter out bit too long and it started to ferment or we noticed that the grapes that we picked, you know, left in a jar started to ferment, and we discovered alcohol by accident.

So the standard story is that alcohol is a result of an evolutionary historical accident. In the 1950s or so, archaeologists started to wonder about these sites, like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, where you see hunter gatherers coming together, building these enormous sites with these huge carved with animals. They were doing something very dramatic. We don’t know what it was. They were feasting on gazelles and other kind of wild game, and they were drinking something – huge vats of liquid. And we don’t have  direct chemical evidence from this site, but we do have it from other sites in the region. So this is 10 to 12,000 years ago. We know that they were making beer. So you have these hunter gatherers coming together, building these monumental ritual sites and drinking beer. And that got archaeologists starting to think that maybe the story was the other way around, that actually the thing the draw for hunter gatherers to settle down and cultivating crops was not bread, it was beer.

Edward Slingerland 00:12:24 This is so-called beer before bread hypothesis. And you see the same pattern when you start to look at other parts of the world. The first plants that are cultivated seem to be chosen for their psychoactive properties, not for their nutrition properties. So it seems that actually the desire to make beer and wine is what convinced us to settle down and start growing other crops. So there’s a very direct sense in which our desire to drink alcohol led to civilization and seems to have been the main driver. So it was dramatic this desire to make alcoholic beverages caused a dramatic change in our lifestyle as a species.

Natalie MacLean 00:13:02 I think those people had their priorities straight. I like that the bread before beer or no, wait a minute. Beer before bread.

Edward Slingerland 00:13:08 Beer before bread.

Natalie MacLean 00:13:09 Why was ancient beer production so dangerous back then?

Edward Slingerland 00:13:12 Alcohol in general is dangerous. It’s costly economically. So it’s estimated that in ancient Sumur up to two thirds of their grain production was used for beer. So they’re taking this nutritious substance and turning it into a low level neurotoxin. You have people harvesting grapes that would be delicious, eaten fresh, but they’re fermenting it. And again, turning it into something that is dangerous for the human body. So, you know, the especially in Canada, there’s been a lot of press lately about the dangers of alcohol and the two wine glasses of wine per day thing has been thrown out the door. It does seem like physiologically alcohol negative for human beings. So it’s costly economically. It’s costly. Physiologically it can raise your risk of cancer, risk of liver damage. So this desire to settle down and start producing alcohol created some new costs for human beings. So that’s the sense in which alcohol is a costly habit.

Natalie MacLean 00:14:15 Yeah, absolutely. We’re going to dive more into those aspects. But beer production itself was dangerous. Like to make beer back then, right?

Edward Slingerland 00:14:23 Not so much physically dangerous. Once we invent distillation, things get dangerous. It really increases the risk of the thing we’re producing. And there’s physical dangers of distilling alcohol. Fermentation, particularly beer fermentation, itself is not necessarily dangerous, but it’s incredibly time consuming. There were existing theories out there before I wrote my book about why we would have started consuming alcohol, and they had to do with things like there’s the dirty water hypothesis. In a lot of human cultures, historically, the local groundwater is not safe to drink. And so if you ferment it, it becomes potable. So this is the idea that we started drinking beer making wine because that was the only thing we could drink. The problem with that theory is that you can get the same effect by just boiling water. That makes it safe. And whereas fermentation of beer is just this multi-stage, really elaborate. It’s actually a lot harder than wine. At least making good wine is hard. Making bad wine is pretty easy. It happens by itself, basically. Alcohol is a strange substance. And why we go through these elaborate steps to make it needs a functional explanation as part of the argument.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:33 That’s where you come in. Let’s stay in the past for a bit. Tell us what the Asian flushing syndrome is and why you think it developed.

Edward Slingerland 00:15:42 So this is actually a set of two mutations on different genes. And it’s arisen independently at least three times in human history. So that suggest it’s not an accident. There’s something functional going on. There’s actually signals of selection pressure on these two genes. If you have this syndrome, especially if you have two copies of this mutation, drinking alcohol is unpleasant. You flush, you feel nauseous, you get heart palpitations. It makes alcohol unpleasant. And the reason this flushing syndrome plays an important role in the book is because, you know, there’s these dirty water hypothesis, these other ideas. Another thing people would say when you say – why do people like to drink –  because it just makes us feel good. So there’s the pleasure hijack theory. Alcohol happens to trigger these reward networks in our brain. And so we do it just because it’s pleasurable to us. The Asian flushing syndrome shows that it doesn’t have to be pleasurable. In fact, genetic evolution had this option. And this set of mutations arose, we think 7 to 10,000 years ago in what’s now kind of the area around Shanghai, around the beginning of rice cultivation.

So evolution could have made alcohol unpleasant for us, and it did in one region of the world. And yet this syndrome hasn’t spread very much. If I show a map of where it is now in the world, and it really is just still in China, a little bit in Japan and Korea. So if our taste for alcohol was an evolutionary mistake, so it’s a dangerous thing that happens to make us feel good, this flushing syndrome mutation should have spread throughout the entire world and it hasn’t. So to me it’s signals that there’s other benefits to drinking alcohol that are outweighing the costs and that are keeping this kind of anti-alcohol pleasure gene from spreading everywhere in the world.

Natalie MacLean 00:17:39 And do you have any hypothesis of why it started in Asia and stayed there, like, as opposed to spreading?

Edward Slingerland 00:17:45 So it started around the time rice agriculture started. And the dominant theories is that it seems to be protective against tuberculosis. So it could be that you’ve got people living together in these dense communities. They’ve started cultivating rice. It’s wet. Tuberculosis is a problem. And it’s protective against that. It’s also protective against fungal poisoning. So another theory is they’re storing grain in a damp climate. And this is adaptive for helping them deal with, you know, kind of partially rotted rice. They can still eat it. It seems to have something specifically to do with rice cultivation.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:22 All right. Let’s get on to the prefrontal cortex PFC. So just keep that in mind as you’re listing folks. Prefrontal cortex PFC it’s responsible for reasoning, making decisions, maintaining social norms and other complex cognitive functions. Why do you believe, Ted, that the PFC is the enemy of creativity?

Edward Slingerland 00:18:43 So the PFC, if you want to think about it as like a laser, it allows us to stay focused. Caffeine is the friend of the PFC, so anything that you do better on caffeine is a PFC task. So staying focused on a project, you need to finish doing your taxes. Moving from A to B to C, resisting temptation, resisting distraction, suppressing things that part of your brain wants to do but you know you shouldn’t do. That’s all PFC and it’s great that we have. That is the reason, kids are so especially teenagers are so dangerous as they don’t have fully developed PFCs. It’s also very strange because it’s the last part of a human being to fully develop. So it really doesn’t fully mature until you’re in your mid 20s. So, you know, that’s why 16, 17 year olds running around are fully mature, except for this really crucial part of their brain. And that’s what gets them into so much trouble.

Obviously it evolved for a good reason. And it’s the key to what make humans able to change their behaviour and plan things and think abstractly. But it seems to get in the way of what psychologists sometimes call lateral thinking, so creativity. The way we tend to think of creativity depends on seeing unusual connections, connecting things that don’t obviously connect, or seeing a new possibility, thinking outside the box and thinking, oh, we weren’t we didn’t realize we could do this. You can’t have those kind of insights when the FCC’s in charge. And it seems to be because it’s focusing us on one place, it doesn’t allow the brain to kind of relax and see new possibilities. And this is why young children have no PFC at all, which is why they can’t tie their shoes or get to school on time. They get distracted. You know, you’re always kind of herding kids, trying to get them to focus on things because they don’t have a PFC, but they’re also super creative. So I look at some evidence from child psychology research that shows that a 4 or 5 year old kid can solve these lateral thinking tasks better than an adult can much better. And our ability to solve these tasks goes down over time.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:57 So we peak at 4 then [laughter] creativity wise.

Edward Slingerland 00:21:01 Yeah [laughter]. Creativity wise, we’re at our best at about 4 or 5 and we just get progressively worse.

Natalie MacLean 00:21:07 What are examples of what these 4 year olds do when they do a lateral thinking test?

Edward Slingerland 00:21:11 So Alison Gopnik is the person at Berkeley who’s done this research. She designs these tasks where you’ve got to decide if something is a blicket. You know, she just makes up this word blicket. Is this a blicket? And the rules for determining if something is a blicket are really counterintuitive. It’s not something you would think of it. It’s often something very strange where you have to stack different things on top of each other, and the sound goes off, and that makes it a blicket. It’s not, adults are just that we don’t think that flexibly. So we’re trying normal things like, you know, is it this colour? We’re thinking in terms of patterns of problem solving that we use in our everyday lives that we’re used to. Kids are not constrained by that. They can just think of crazy combinations of things that might be a blicket. So the really good at this kind of divergent thinking and we just get worse and worse as we age is basically kind of linear decline until we hit 25.

Natalie MacLean 00:22:07 Okay. So we know that traditionally wine has or traditionally in the past it had a much lower alcohol on average 8 to 10%. Today, of course, you know, if we get a Shiraz from the Barossa Valley it can be 15% – 16%. Beer also was low in alcohol, 3% – 4% versus maybe, say, 5% – 6% today. Do you believe, therefore, there should be different legal minimum ages for the consumption of wine and beer versus spirits?

Edward Slingerland 00:22:32 Yeah. So for most of our history we’ve been drinking only beer and wine, just naturally fermented beverages. And one of my arguments in the book is that this was a safety feature. So alcohol’s got some dangers but it always came with the safety. One safety feature was the limits of natural fermentation. So historically, beers would be drinking 2% to 3% ABV and fruit wines maybe, maybe 5% or 6%. We’ve been relentlessly pushing yeast to get tougher and tougher for tens of thousands of years. There’s selection. We see super yeasts. I read an article relatively recently about Sake yeast that there’s evidence of selection pressure going back like 10,000 years, a very long time. So we’ve been pushing the limits of natural fermentation for as long as we’ve been making alcohol. But we run up against the wall. So the max we seem to be able to get is these crazy, powerful wines from Australia. That means that there’s a limit to how dangerous beer and wine can be. Even though they’re much stronger than they historically have been, it’s within the same ballpark.

Once we figured out distillation, we take that safety feature off because we figured out a way to pull off the alcohol and just keep pulling off the alcohol. We can get, you know, 90 something percent ABV liquors. This is a very recent development. So this surprised me. I kind of, I don’t know, I always thought we kind of always had distilled liquors. This is a recent invention.

Natalie MacLean 00:24:15 How recent?

Edward Slingerland 00:24: 16 So we’ve in the West really not until the 1600s in terms of on a large enough scale that people would have access to distilled liquor. The principle of it was understood a long time ago. Aristotle wrote about it. But it’s very hard. This is where the danger and technical challenges come in. It’s very hard to pull off distillation on a large scale unless you know metallurgy and glassblowing. You have to be able to keep liquids that are very precise temperature for a long period of time. It’s actually technically quite difficult. So it wasn’t until the 1600s in Europe and probably maybe a couple hundred years earlier in China that distilled liquors were available on a large scale so your average person could drink gin or whatever. And this completely changes things, because once we have alcohol in the super potent form, it just it overwhelms our system. We have these mechanisms that we’ve inherited from primate ancestors who started eating partially fermented fruit on the forest floor. We have these mechanisms to toxicify ethanol and that they work at kind of natural fermentation levels. Once you start doing shots of a 90 something percent distilled liquor, it just completely overwhelms your body’s defenses. And you can go from being sober to being really dangerously drunk in 10 or 15 minutes. So distilled liquors are really a game changer and represent a different level of risk for human beings.

Edward Slingerland 00:25:35 Whereas the traditional beers let’s say that we drank 2% to 3%. If you’re a large person and you’re eating some food, you could drink those all day long and never. Most benefits that I talk about for alcohol mostly come in about 0.08 blood alcohol content. And if you’re drinking a low ABV beer or a milder wine, you can kind of sip that all day long. Not really ever get beyond that sweet spot, but distilled liquor is much more dangerous. So I really think, and this is the case in some European countries, that distilled liquor even though it’s just ethanol – it’s the same drug technically as beer and wine – it should be regulated differently. It should be treated as a much more dangerous drug. And so, my daughter, I’ve raised her in kind of the more southern European lifestyle where she got introduced to wine very early. You know, you give her a little bit watered down. And when she got older into her teens, I’d let her sip a little wine. And she’s actually developed a quite good palate. She’s really she doesn’t have quite the vocabulary, but she definitely can discriminate tastes in wine. I think that’s healthy and normal and helps encourage a sense that wine or beer is part of a meal. It’s part of a normal thing human beings do. But I’ve always been very clear with her that distilled liquors are something that you shouldn’t do until that part of her brain is fully developed. I don’t think people should be allowed to drink distilled liquor until their 20s, well into their 20s.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:01 All right, I agree. And even the distribution should be, I think, not at the corner store. Although I’m an advocate of privatization of the liquor boards across Canada, it’s like that seems like to be in a different category.

Edward Slingerland 00:27:14 Yeah, absolutely.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:16 Okay. So why do you think then that wine is the king of intoxicants, as you call it? What makes it better than all the rest?

Edward Slingerland 00:27:23 Yeah. So not necessarily wine in particular, but alcohol for sure is the king of intoxicants. And it’s because it just no other drug that we’ve discovered does all the same things. In the book, I talk about two other possible candidates. So cannabis we’ve had for a very long time. We’ve been cultivating that for probably at least 6000 years. And that’s got advantages over alcohol. It’s less physiologically harmful. So it doesn’t seem to harm your body as much as ethanol does. It can be psychologically addictive, but it’s not physically addictive the way alcohol is. We don’t see cannabis use socially historically. We don’t see it as widespread as alcohol. And that’s because it’s got two main flaws. It’s hard to dose. So if you’re smoking it, you have to know how to hold it in your lungs. And different people are going to get different doses depending on how they do that. Whereas you don’t have to teach someone how to drink a beer and they just drink it. And it’s pretty natural. If you take it in an edible form, especially as people have access to legal cannabis and gummies have discovered, the onset is so long that it’s really hard to dose. You’ll take some. Two hours later, nothing’s happening. Take some more, and then you’re like go way too much. So it’s hard to dose. It also has really variable effects on different people. So, you know, I have friends who smoke cannabis and then want to talk about philosophy or go dancing or it makes it very social and active. I’ve tried every variety of cannabis that exists and without fail makes me super paranoid. And then I fall asleep. So it’s just it’s a terrible social drug for me. The drug that you use culturally to help people come together, to get them to cooperate, to get them to trust one another, it can’t be something that has really variable effects in all of them. If some of them are falling asleep, some of them want to dance…

Natalie MacLean 00:29:19 It’s not a dinner party, kind of vibe [laughter]

Edward Slingerland 00:29:22 [laughter] dinner party kind of vibe, right? You don’t want to go have a business meeting where everyone’s smoking cannabis and having these different experiences. So the nice thing about alcohol is it’s easy to dose.  It has very predictable effects across people. So that’s its big advantage over cannabis.

And then we’ve also, for a very long time had access to psychedelics of various kinds. So mushrooms, various plants that are hallucinogens, they’re physically not as dangerous as alcohol actually. Physiologically, psilocybin is safer than alcohol, also not physically addictive, which is great. But they. Again, imagine the new neighbours move in and you invite them over for some psilocybin mushrooms. They just would go really weird, right? [laughter]. It so disassociates you from reality and for such a long time. It’s pretty useless as a social drug. Historically, it’s typically been used if it’s used by everyone in the society it’s used once or twice a year at a very special event where, you know, you block off a day or two for it. Or it’s used by a special class of people, so shamans or priests use it as a way to communicate with the spirit world or whatever, but you don’t use it as an everyday social drug. So we haven’t discovered anything. If you were a cultural engineer and you wanted to invent a drug, it’s got to be super easy to discover, easy to make. It needs to have predictable effects on people, easy to dose, very short half life. So it has to have an effect on you. But then an hour or two hours later, you’re perfectly fine. Ideally, it should pair nicely with food. It’s beer and wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:31:07 Absolutely. Yeah. No, it’s a great engineering team that put that together. Yeah. That’s great. And so how does alcohol down regulator, slow down the PFC? What’s actually happening, as we drink, to our PFC?

Edward Slingerland 00:31:22 Alcohol has been compared to a pharmacological hand grenade, says Stephen Brown the journalist has called it that. Unlike cocaine or LSD, which go in and very kind of surgically target one part of the brain, ethanol just kind of goes in and is like a kid hitting a piano. It’s just doing all these different things at once. We tend to think of it as a depressant, but it’s actually a stimulant as well. So one thing it’s stimulating is these pro-social chemicals in our body. So serotonin, endorphin, these things that make us feel expansive and kind of feel good about ourselves and more kindly disposed to other people. So it’s stimulating that. But then it’s simultaneously depressing certain brain regions. And one of the first brain regions that goes after is the PFC. So it’s the effect that I think is really one of the functions that we’re going after with ethanol is it’s turning the PFC down. So as adults, we have this fully functioning PFC. That’s great. I think that alcohol is a tool we’ve invented when we need to temporarily turn it back down a few notches and get a little bit back to being more like a 4 or 5 year old in terms of our creativity and trustingness and sociality. So that’s one of the main effects is it’s really just depressing the function of the prefrontal cortex.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:44 So our PFC isn’t making connections as fast. It’s not worried about what’s in front of us. It’s just going like kind of laying back on the couch…

Edward Slingerland 00:32:52 Yeah, it’s the way the analogy I like use at one point is a playground monitor is gone.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:54 I like that

Edward Slingerland 00:32:55 So, you know, the FCC’s not there telling you kind of do A, B, C. It’s taking a nap or it’s left for a lunch break. And now different parts of the brain are allowed to talk to each other. And these feel good chemicals are allowed to start making you more cooperative and friendly and social.

Natalie MacLean 00:33:17 And if different parts of the brain are starting to talk to each other, there’s your lateral thinking, your creativity. Is there one part of the brain that is most associated with creativity or is it the many connections, the lateral ability?

Edward Slingerland 00:33:29 It’s the connections. Yeah, it’s not so much a region. It’s the ability of different regions to talk to each other.

Natalie MacLean 00:33:35 Okay. And you mentioned that creativity peaks around 0.08% alcohol, which is when we shouldn’t drive, but we should write or do a sonata or whatever, I guess. And then like, when do we go out of that zone? Like when is it too much and everything just becomes sloppy and blurry.

Edward Slingerland 00:33:54 When you get to about 0.2. So the motor cortex eventually gets depressed by alcohol. Once you’ve reached that level, it’s no good anymore. So once you start slurring your words, you start stumbling, that’s when your BAC has gotten to a point that it’s targeting now your motor cortex.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:14 All right. That’s the part where my tasting notes become [laughter].

Edward Slingerland 00:34:17 Yeah, exactly. You’re just like great wine [laughter].

Natalie MacLean 00:34:22 What is BAC?

Edward Slingerland 00:34:23 Blood alcohol content. So .08 in most jurisdictions is where around where you should stop operating motor vehicles. And that seems to be about where you kind of get the maximal kind of creativity, sociality. And you go much beyond that and just stupid, dangerous things start to happen.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:44 Right, okay. And is this state that down regulated PFC? Is it different or similar to a runner’s high, those endorphins that kick in after a long run?

Edward Slingerland 00:34:55 Yeah, it’s very similar. It’s physiologically in many ways the same state. So the runner’s high occurs because you’re taxing your body so much that it needs to start shutting stuff down. It doesn’t have the luxury to run everything. You kind of think about like if you have a backup generator and the power goes out, you’re not going to power your hot tub anymore. You’re going to focus on the things you really need: the lights, the refrigerator. And when the body is stressed, it says, okay, what do we not need anymore? And the PFC is the first thing it looks at because it’s physiologically pretty expensive, and it’s the most evolutionarily novel part of the brain. So it targets that first. And so you get the PFC down regulation, and you also get the body producing endorphins and other things that it does when it exercises and stressed. So that runner’s high is actually very similar physiologically to the way you feel after a glass or two or wine. And you can also get there… I talk in the book about the fact that religious traditions that ban chemical intoxicants for whatever reason often substitute other practices to get you there. Singing and dancing all night…

Natalie MacLean 00:36:07 The whirling dervishes who get…

Edward Slingerland 00:36:12 Whirling dervishes yeah. It’s very similar to the runner’s high. So you’re getting people to stress their bodies through sleep deprivation or starvation. You know, you fast [then] you can get into a very similar state of mind as you do with alcohol.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:25 Even the self-flagellation that’s like –  I’m no longer a Catholic –  that’s whipping yourself. I don’t know.

Edward Slingerland 00:36:32 Yeah. Because pain will do it. Pain will have the same effect. So there are other ways to get to that same state besides alcohol.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:40 Meditation probably as well, I guess? I don’t know.

Edward Slingerland 00:36:43 Yeah. Meditation, because you’re there you’re almost trying to use your mind to shut your mind down. You’re trying to use your breathing and posture to almost deliberately shut down the PFC. But that’s really hard to do, which is why most people find meditation very difficult.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:02 You’re conscious of what you’re conscious of and like going around in circles. But what about the when you’re in a flow state as a writer? That seems like you’re really focused? Is that more on the caffeine side of things and less… Is your PFC operating and you lose awareness of your surroundings is similar or different?

Edward Slingerland 00:37:20 That’s similar. Being in the zone in any way is similar. And as a writer, you can get there. I mean as I discussed in the book, a good way to get there is a glass or two of wine [laughter]. There’s a reason that historically, we’ve associated alcohol with artists and poets and creative types because there’s good evidence that it enhances creativity. But again, you can get there just through. In a way, it’s like the runner’s high. It’s pain. So you’re working on something really hard. You’re stressing your brain out. You’re fatiguing your brain in the same way you fatigue it when you go a long distance running. And then it just kind of goes all right and relaxes. Ideally, this can happen and then you start to get creative insights. So that’s another way to do it is just kind of stressing your mind in the same way you would stress your body exercise wise can get you into that flow.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:16 I love that explanation. I’ve never been able to figure it out. That’s great.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:26 Well there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Edward. Here are my takeaways. Number one, how does alcohol, especially wine, foster our creativity, trusting ness, and sociability? Edward observes that alcohol stimulates the pro-social chemicals in our body, like serotonin and endorphins that make us feel expansive and feel good about ourselves, and more kindly disposed to other people. One of the brain regions that gets quieted by alcohol is the prefrontal cortex. And that’s the judgy, judgy intellectual planning kind of part of our brains. He believes that alcohol is a tool that we’ve invented when we need to temporarily turn it back down a few notches and get closer to being more like our 4 and 5 year old selves in terms of our creativity, our trustingness, and our sociability.

Number two, what does the bread before beer hypothesis suggest about alcohol’s role in the development of civilization? As Edward explains, the standard story until relatively recently was that humans were hunter gatherers for most of our history. At some point, we discovered that we could cultivate grains and settled down, started making bread and other grain products. Then at some point after that, someone left their sourdough starter out a bit too long and it started to ferment. Or maybe we noticed that the grapes that we had picked had started to ferment in a jar, and we discovered alcohol by accident. So that’s the traditional story, that it was an evolutionary or historical accident. But since then, archaeologists believe that the story is the other way around. The draw for hunter gatherers to settle down and cultivate crops wasn’t bread, it was beer. And that is the so-called beer before bread hypothesis.

And number three, should there be different minimum drinking ages for wine and beer versus spirits? Edward says that once distilled liquors became available on a large scale, the dangers of alcohol in this super potent form became greater because it can overwhelm our system. So we have these mechanisms to detoxify ethanol that we inherited from our primate ancestors, who started eating partially fermented fruit on the forest floor. This works at natural fermentation levels. Once you start doing shots, though of 90 something percent distilled liquor, it just completely overwhelms our body’s defenses. And you can go from being sober to being dangerously drunk in 10 to 15 minutes. Edward doesn’t think people should be allowed to drink distilled liquor until well into their 20s, and I have to agree.

In the show notes, you’ll find the full transcript of my conversation with Edward, links to his website and books the video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now no matter where you live. If you missed episode 21, go back and take a listen. I chat with author John Mahoney about why he believes that wine is the source of civilization. I’ll share a short clip now with you to whet your appetite.

John Mahoney 00:41:38 Who was the first person that made wine. I was taught that civilization had established itself from, say, Babylon or Egypt. We go back to the time of Christ. That’s 2000 years. Everything else is BC. And everybody thought that wine was 3000. Then they said, well, no, it’s probably 4000  even 5000 years old. But two places established that that was incorrect. The University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania. Both of them did research and found out that it’s well over 3, 4 or 5000 years old. They’ve proven and actually have done scientific testing to prove that wine production is probably seven and a half to 8000 years old. My research took it further, and I’m saying that we started with wine right after the last ice age.

Natalie MacLean 00:42:27 You won’t want to miss next week when we continue our chat with Edward. If you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell one friend about the podcast this week, especially someone you know who’d be interested in learning more about how wine and other types of alcohol contributed to creating our civilization. It’s easy to find my podcasts. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favourite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website at nataliemaclean.com/podcast. Email me if you have a sip, tip, question, or if you’d like to win one of five copies of my book or one of two copies of Edward’s book  or if you’re reading my book or listening to it at natalie@ nataliemaclean.com.

In the show notes, you’ll also find a link to take a free online food and wine pairing class with me called the Five Wine and Food Pairing Mistakes That Can Ruin Your dinner and How to Fix Them Forever at nataliemaclean.com/class. And that’s all in the show notes at nataliemaclean.com/300. Thank you for taking the time to join me here and for being with me on this journey. I hope something great is in your glass, perhaps a wine with a decidedly civilizing effect on you. Not that you need that. Cheers.

You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially the secret full bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at nataliemaclean.com/subscribe. Meet me here next week. Cheers.

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