Ask anyone down the pub what happens when you drink and they’ll have the answer: you cheer up and loosen up. Yet until now no one has explored what happens in the brain during intoxication.

Jodi Gilman and her colleagues at the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, used MRI to observe the brain activity of 12 healthy “social drinkers” both when sober and after they had been given alcohol intravenously and their blood alcohol levels had reached nearly 0.08 grams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood – the legal limit for driving …