There is a recently published book that analyzes the relationship between creativity and alcohol. It is titled The Journey to Echo Spring and has been written by renowned British author Olivia Laing. It is republished by Paidós – the previous edition came from the hand of Ático de los libros – and among its pages we not only find a tour of the settings where writers such as John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald passed through, but we also find a whole scientific investigation about the process that leads people to become dependent on drinking.
To compose her work, Olivia Laing interviewed a series of medical specialists. One of them—Dr. Petros Levounis—explains to us the mechanism of what he calls the ‘brain switch’; a natural device that sets disaster in motion. The aforementioned switch is located in the so-called nucleus accumbens of the brain, a neuronal group in charge of pleasure and reward; a point located in the subcortical region where the will is controlled to convert it into an action, in this case the action of drinking. Continuing with the explanations of Dr. Petros Levounis, there are a series of genetic, social and psychological factors that lead to alcoholism and that must not be discarded when making a clinical picture.
Because any drink with alcohol alters the central nervous system and, if there is also a predisposition, as one becomes more dependent on the drink, the brain tends to compensate for the inhibitory effects. It does this by deploying neurotransmitters such as dopamine, a chemical messenger responsible for excitement and pleasure. Therefore, following Olivia Laing’s study, when a person stops drinking an ‘anxiety eruption’ appears due to decompensation in the neural network.
Turkish-American ophthalmologist Zeynel Karcioglu, who specializes in the work of Tennessee Williams, hypothesized that Williams’ alcoholism manifested itself in his habit of interrupting his characters’ sentences. Incomplete dialogues reveal a form of aphasia, the same one that occurs in irrecoverable alcoholics when it comes to speaking. Therefore, his speeches are full of gaps. These gaps “occur as a consequence of alcohol in the hippocampus.” It is curious to see how the author transferred the effects of alcoholism to his own characters.
We must remember that the hippocampus is the place in our brain where memory is located and that, with alcohol, it is enveloped in the fog of forgetting. What is translated as the loss of faculties in everything related to the creation of new memories. The only thing that the alcoholic lives is the present, something that, on the other hand – and paraphrasing Wittgenstein – makes the alcoholic live eternity, as long as he does not lack drink, of course; while the way can be made Echo Spring which is a brand of Kentucky bourbon and the name with which, the protagonist of Williams’ work, Cat on a Hot Tin Roofknocks on the closet where the liquor is kept.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exerts its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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