Alcohol as a study tool? Drinking after learning boosts memory

Enlarge (credit: Getty | FRANCOIS GUILLOT )

Cheers!-not to your health, but to your memory.

Drinking alcohol after learning information appears to aid the brain's ability to store and remember that information later, according to a study of at-home boozing in Scientific Reports. The memory-boosting effect-which has been seen in earlier lab-based studies-linked up with how much a person drank: the more alcohol, the better the memory the next day.

The study authors, led by psychopharmacologist Celia Morgan of University of Exeter, aren't sure why alcohol improves memory in this way, though. They went into the experiment hypothesizing that alcohol blocks the brain's ability to lay down new memories, thus freeing up noggin power to carefully encode and store the fresh batch of memories that just came in. In other words, after you start drinking, your ability to remember new things gets wobbly, but your memory of events and information leading up to that drink might be sturdier than normal.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments