Drinking Alcohol Might Improve Your Memory

Alcohol and health, never seem to go along, or that's what we had believed until now. A recent study by University of Exeter in Britain has claimed that alcohol may improve the memory, by helping in retaining whatever was learnt right before the drinking session. The researchers have however pointed that this positive effect must be considered alongside with the well known negative impacts of alcohol. But the focus of this research was not to counter those already established short comings, rather to find out how it can be positive.

Researchers from the university met with 88 social drinkers and gave them a word learning task. The participants were split into two parts at random and told to drink as much as they liked, the average being four units, or not drink at all.

The research has not yet given a conclusive reason as to why the process happens. But the speculation is that alcohol inhibits the brain from learning new information. This results in brain having a higher capacity to retain the previously learnt information. "The theory is that the hippocampus - the brain area really important in memory - switches to 'consolidating' memories, transferring from short into longer-term memory," said Celia Morgan, Professor at University of Exeter in a paper published in Nature Journal Scientific Reports.

The next day, they all did the same task again - and those who had drunk alcohol remembered more of what they had learned. "Our research not only showed that those who drank alcohol did better when repeating the word-learning task, but that this effect was stronger among those who drank more," Morgan said. In the second task, the participants had to look at images on screen, but the results had not any significant difference. "The theory is that the hippocampus - the brain area really important in memory - switches to 'consolidating' memories, transferring from short into longer-term memory," she sai

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