Here's What Mythbusters Taught Us About Alcohol

Should you decide to get involved in the seedy underworld of pool halls and speakeasies, it's important to have a friend in the know. Someone with the experience to warn you when you're stepping into dangerous territory. A pal with a pocket full of helpful mnemonic truisms like "Beer before liquor, throw up quicker," and, "To avoid getting hurty, don't text past 10:30."

Unfortunately, some people don't have friends, since they won't stop beginning sentences with "actually" or trying to impress coworkers by saying stuff like "if you hit the ground running in real life, you won't go any faster. I saw it on Mythbusters." For those folks, Mythbusters is the basic cable surrogate pal that has your back through every bad booze encounter, no matter what liquid oxygen-fueled hijinks you might want to get yourself into. In 2008, the series explored myths about booze, giving inside kids the skinny on the demon drink. Here's what was revealed.

First off, we learned that the legitimacy of myths about how people react to alcohol can be hard to pin down. Everyone's body responds a little differently to the introduction of a coursing stream of hooch, particularly if you're a giant, so the best the team was able to surmise was that some of the myths were "plausible."

Exhibit A: "Alcohol makes people seem more attractive." Adam, Jamie, and Kari approached this one in the most free-spirited and wild-eyed manner possible: With a numeric scoring system in a sterile, controlled environment. Each participant was shown 30 photos of strangers and asked to assign each one a rating based on physical attractiveness, first sober, then tipsy, then several drinks in. They all responded differently, but there was an upward trend overall. Boom, plausible.

Helpfully, the rest of the experiments centered around what can and can't sober you up after a night on the town. Old cartoon staples like dunking your head in ice water and drinking black coffee were summarily busted, while vigorous exercise and a slap across the face were deemed plausible. Yes, according to the Discovery Channel, you should slap drunk people if you want them to behave in a more level-headed fashion. Who says that TV isn't educational?