You Can't Afford to Get Drunk

Your brain is a fantastic organism. By sheer electricity, it has the capacity to learn, to remember, to dictate, to follow, to impulse, to react, and to retain. It's responsible for every inane action in your body that we take for granted, such as breathing and beating our hearts. The brain is the most precious and the most fragile thing in the human body, and here at Luther College, there are people that willingly destroy their own brains every weekend with a substance we all generally accept as college students. That substance is alcohol.

Our educational psychology class was treated to a lecture about alcohol's affect on the human brain. What we learned could scare anyone off of liquor for the rest of their lives. The brain, as explained to us by our quirky lecturer, is a slurpy sponge. It takes in all that it is exposed to and absorbs information at an incredible rate. If that sponge is taken up by alcohol, no information can be sucked in, and the brain is immediately impaired. In fact, when a person becomes drunk, the first function of the brain to shut down is complex judgment. That's why those girls across the bar that you would never talk to in a million years don't seem so bad after a couple of brews.

As the presenter went on, we learned that the long-lasting effects of alcohol impairing the brain are very much like the effects of a concussion. These symptoms can include severe bouts of dizziness, memory loss, spatial unawareness, and a loss of balance. The bottom line is this. Alcohol is not a harmless substance. It kills your brain, and if you kill your brain, you kill yourself. As an epileptic, I cannot afford to impair my brain any further than it is already affected. In light of the information presented to our class by this lecture, I say hold on the wonderful brains that you have. You can't afford to get drunk.