The cerebral cortex shares extensive connections with a wide array of brain areas, so ethanol effects on the cerebral cortex can obviously have wide-ranging behavioral consequences. Some promising candidates for alcohol’s effects include the projections to and from the thalamus that process somatosensory inputs and working memory (as well as participating in the sleep-wake cycle), the projections to the amygdala that help to regulate social and emotional behavior, projections to the hippocampus from the entorhinal cortex as part of the spatial memory circuitry, and the projections to the NAcc and VTA that modulate reward-seeking and-risk taking, in addition to reinforcement and drug-seeking [50].
