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Anyone who likes the occasional visit to a bar or pub will be fully aware of alcohol's many effects. It can change the way we look, adding a rosiness to our cheeks, improve our mood and of course, make us feel tipsy. However, a lesser-known effect of having a cocktail or beer is that it can, in fact, alter the way we speak, and I’m not talking about slurring words. Studies have shown that one too many cocktails can actually make our natural accents stronger. At your next dinner event, try to spot if you can notice a friend’s accent is different after a couple of glasses of wine.
Any changes in tone you’ve noticed when a friend is tipsy have most likely been put down to the booze making them louder and rowdier. The reality is that the suggestion that accents grow stronger as a result of alcohol consumption does have its basis in scientific fact.
A professor of health science at Stockton University who studies how alcohol affects different parts of the brain and the resulting effect that has on our speech and behaviour had some interesting findings. Amee Shah discovered that alcohol alters the part of the brain responsible for moderating behavior. This allows us to act in a more relaxed and natural way, making us more prone to embracing any natural twang.
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Many people are well aware of how alcohol makes us feel less self-conscious in the way we act and the things we say, but many wouldn’t have thought this applies to accents too. The frontal cortex and prefrontal cortex are affected when we drink alcohol. Attention, memory, and movement are diminished as well as our ability to plan what we’re going to say.
Despite much of it is subconscious, we focus less on our accents, our natural manner of speaking becomes much more noticeable. Shah’s study also found that we naturally mimic the accents around us when drinking. If you’ve ever thought you and your friend are starting to sound alike, there’s a good reason why.
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The Smells That Take You Back in Time
They say that music has the ability to transport us back to a different place in our lives. That’s true, but don’t smells have exactly the same effect too? What wafts up your nostrils can be just as potent as what you hear. We all have those special, and even not-so-special, aromas that are associated with many and varied points in our lives.
The brand of deodorant we used in high school whizzes us straight back to the locker rooms after gym class. The smell of a pencil being sharpened is a buzz you won’t have had since elementary school. And that strange smell as the glue holding a packet of trading cards is prised apart? Congratulations, you’re ten years old again. What about the smell of a home-cooked meal - does that bring you to your grandmother's kitchen, or perhaps it reminds you of a neighbor's house? Smells are different for different people.
Scents are even used by food stores to sell their products. This may cause your entire belief system to fall apart, but bread isn’t always baked in-store. But the stores use the smell of baking bread from a can to entice you to keep shopping and spending. They know exactly what they’re doing because they know the human brain equates the smell with freshness and good quality produce! The next time you get that smell of freshly baked bread, check if you can really see where it's coming from!
We’ve only got five senses and they’re all as acute and finely tuned as each other. It’s no surprise that what we smell should rank alongside the food and drinks we can taste, the artifacts we can touch, the sounds we can hear, and the things we can see as a way of bringing it all back. Having a powerful sense of smell is as important as what we see in front of us, especially when something is burning.
