Small amounts of alcohol can impair the brain's ability to process visual movement, which is useful for hand-eye coordination.
Don't store avocado like this: it's dangerousJust a small amount of alcohol can impair the brain's ability to process the visual movement, essential for hand-eye coordination. In short, according to the results of a recent study, very little alcohol is enough to cloud your eyesight and compromise some skills such as driving a car.
Researchers from the Ames Research Center of NASA and San Jose State University have in fact come to the conclusion that sight would be the first faculty to go into crisis after taking even little alcohol: to a person of 75 kg half a beer would be enough to lose hand-eye coordination.
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A systematic review
The study, published in The Journal of Physiology, was conducted by administering small amounts of alcoholic beverages to a group of volunteers. The drinks raised the BAC in the blood of the people tested by a percentage between 0,2 and 0,6% (remembering that the legal limit for driving in Europe is 0,5%) and, a Once the test participants alcohol entered the circulation, they measured themselves with a series of hand-eye coordination tests conducted using special software and a controller similar to that of video games.
During the "game" phase, the scholars examined 21 parameters relating to neurological processes and the movement of the pupils: some of these points worsen with a blood alcohol level of 0,015%, three times lower than that allowed by the highway code. All test participants were male and female students between the ages of 20 and 30, accustomed to drinking modest amounts of alcohol once or twice a week.
"Examining a range of eye movement responses can be used to detect extremely small impairment of neural function," said Leland Stone, one of the study's authors. Some aspects of visiomotor function are compromised only after a small amount of alcohol: one drink or less for the average person ”.
This means that even if we feel good, our level of hand-eye coordination may still be compromised.
NASA's goal was to understand how external factors of various types can compromise the neurological faculties of healthy individuals, even if in a reversible way: the results of this experiment will be used to estimate the decay of brain capacities caused by different stresses, for example the tiredness or an alteration in the force of gravity.
Fonte: The Journal of Physiology
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