Of all the pastimes that human beings have sought and enjoyed over the millennia, the second most popular and enduring one has always been drinking to excess.

As long as humanity has had civilization, we have had alcohol. It is fair to say that humanity is a drinking species, Muslim and Mormon territories aside. Whether it’s ouzo in a Greek taverna, hot sake in a karaoke bar in Japan, or a six pack of beer in front of the television here in North America, people all over the world relax by drinking.

Why? What makes this such a persistent vice?

Of course, we are all familiar with the more obvious effects of alcohol. It relaxes people, lowers their inhibitions, makes them feel more confident and calm, and greatly reduces their levels of bodily stress.

It also gives most people nasty hangovers, greatly distorts their motor skills and sense of judgement, suppresses their good judgement and proper decision making, and quite often leads to nausea, vomiting, and feeling very ill indeed, not to mention leading to countless fatal accidents and cases of alcohol related illnesses like cirrhosis and renal failure per year.

Obviously, people as individuals and society in general must be getting something fairly profound out of alcohol in order for people to feel that, overall, it is worth it.

Arguably, one could get a lot of the same benefits from any number of healthier things. What does alcohol, and in particular drinking heavily, have that other things do not?

Apart from convenience?

The answer, I think, lies in electroshock therapy. Or rather, as is it more properly called, electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT.

It may surprise you to know that a form of electroshock therapy still exists in the world, and that far from being a dim relic of far less enlightened times rightly relegated to the dust bun of history along with hydrotherapy and the lobotomy, it is still practiced till this very day, albeit only in very specific circumstances.

In ECT, the patient is put under general anesthetic and convulsions are induced via the precise application of a small amount of electrical current to the brain via electrodes attached to the patients’ forehead. It it used primarily in cases of very severe depression that has not responded to any other treatment.

Now one might ask, how on Earth can a zap to the brain that makes you go into convulsions help treat depression? And truth be told, science does not really know. That is one of the reason ECT remains a controversial treatment used only in extremis. ^[1]

But there are various theories, and the one that I subscribe to is that ECT essentially acts as a reset button for the brain.

Normally, our brain are never truly “off”. Even when we sleep, the brain carries on. In fact, in many ways, the brain is even more active when we sleep than when we wake. It simply does not have consciousness.

But with ECT, the brain is truly rebooted. It has to bring all its various functions online one at a time again, just like your computer has to when you reboot it.

And just like your computer, the brain functions much better after it has been rebooted. All the incomplete thoughts, suppressed emotions, long forgotten mental processes, and other junk has been flushed out and your mind can function at maximum capacity, fast and lean and strong and powerful. Confusion, doubt, the fog of the mind, all gone.

No wonder it counters depression, at least for a time.

And I think that is what drinking to excess, or specifically drinking until you pass out, does for people. It provides a chemical way to reboot the brain.

I think this is also what people get from other methods of inducing extreme mental states. Whether you are a prophet wandering in the desert for days until hunger and dehydration make you hallucinate or a jogger who keeps going until you drop, people around the world have discovered ways of overwhelming their minds and forcing them to shut down and start again.

This is also why people value being “in the zone” so much. When your task absorbs every little bit of your attention, forcing you to focus entirely on the here and now, this brings the great joy of having one’s mind all in one place for once… just like after a reboot.

Even some forms of meditation work on this principle, although in that case, the process is more akin to defragmenting your computer’s memory while it is running rather than a completely cold rebooting.

So that’s it. That’s why people drink till they pass out and call it a good time. That is why they endure the nausea and hangovers and bad judgement and incidental injuries, all for an experience they might not even remember later.

The hangover is temporary, but the clearing of the mind lingers on.

It pays to reboot your brain now and then.