clipped from: www.livescience.com In the name of science, eight men and seven women drank alcohol through a straw while lying in an MRI scanner, presumably not all together, to see what would happen.
Only 6 minutes after consuming an amount of alcohol equivalent to three beers — leading to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.06 percent, which impairs driving ability — changes had already taken place in the brain cells.
For one thing, the brain begins to run on the sugar in alcohol instead of using glucose, the normal brain food.
The concentration of substances such as creatine (energy metabolism), which protect brain cells, decreases as the concentration of alcohol increases. Choline, a component of cell membranes, was also reduced.
"That probably indicates that alcohol triggers changes in the composition of cell membranes," Biller said.