Turns out all you need to do is have two drinks (or more) a day and, voila!, honey you've shrunk your brain. Such is the news coming out today from a study of about 2000 adults: teetotalers have bigger brains (in volume) than either light drinkers or heavy drinkers, while the brains of heavy drinkers are smaller. Before you and your shrunken brain pour that bottle of pinot noir down the drain, and retreat to the sun deck to nurse a glass of milk , though, consider this: doctors have long known that heavy drinking can contribute to dementia. One of my favorite brain slides shows two brains, side by side. They both have a lot of cerebral spinal fluid between the cortex and the skull, and they both have a lot of CSF in the ventricles (which are essentially the brain's waste-water facility). To an untrained eye, the brains look identical, and if you were to have met their owners when they were still alive, they very well might have behaved in a similar way because both were demented. Only the one on the right had Alzheimer's, while the one on the left was suffering from alcohol-induced dementia. (This slide should be part of the standard health curriculum at everyhigh school.)
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