Remoulding our intuitions about alcohol can deliver an enriched experience requiring less effort.
Over time we can shape our unconscious as well conscious thoughts, allowing us to start to align our intuitive ideas about alcohol with scientifically establish facts.
Replacing our existing intuitions about alcohol with more reliable ones can be incredibly rewarding, allowing us to make good decisions quickly with little effort.
The intuitive responses do not necessarily come easily and, in the case of alcohol, as in other areas, can require perseverance, creativity and a wider rethink to cement them in place.
Brain training
We typically only really learn to walk, talk, eat and interact as a standard elements of our growing up curriculum. Beyond that what we learning is less uniform.
It is only thanks to years of practice and the efforts of our parents and wider society that most of us can draw, read, write and drive a car with ease. It is all down to training.
In the right circumstances we can acquire intuitive knowledge of obscure things too, like magnetic fields, like fluid mechanics, Russian irregular verbs, mitochondria, plastering or plumbing.
After years of consistent practice we all tend to become effortless performers in something that is likely to be marvelled at by people who have not had such immersion.
Similar learning process can also enable us to acquire softer skills like social skills, public speaking, or even correcting our posture.
Liquid learning
We learn about things we ingest too, like food and drink, medicines and psychoactives, with alcohol the most common and potent.
Most of us learn about alcohol much as we do riding a bike, with almost no theory and a lot of trial and error.
The fatal flaw is that hearsay and our own perceptions cannot be relied on when trying to form an understanding of a psychoactive.
Drinking alcohol leaves the overwhelming impression it eases stress, trauma, sleep and social awkwardness, but really makes them worse.
Vast advertising budgets and our need to fit in make our false first-hand impressions the easiest takeaways.
This means we can often live for years with very strong but very inaccurate intuitions about alcohol which backfire on us.
Reshaping our intuition
The good news is, however, that intuitions around alcohol are learned and can be remoulded to conform to reality.
A solid base of scientific research can be used to reshape them, allowing us to see where alcohol’s immediate impressions are misleading.
We can change our lifestyles and start gathering new impressions, so forming new intuitions, perhaps by having days and months off.
Like all learning remoulding our alcohol intuition comes most easily when seen as creative process with rewards along the way and payoffs.
There are many such payoffs: avoiding mishaps and illness, lower costs, and improved relationships, memories, mood, cognition and resilience.
Remoulding our intuition can enrich our ideas, shedding inspiring new light on psychology, relationships, lifestyle, philosophy and social goals.
Why would we not attempt to enrich our lives in this way? ■