Drinking good for memory?

A new scientific study on rats suggests that low to moderate drinking of alcohol may actually improve memory. The researchers at the University of Auckland and Ohio State University studied how giving alcohol to genetically-engineered rats affected a particular neuronal receptor that's essential to memory. From Scientific American:

According to (University of Auckland researcher Maggie) Kalev, it is hard to relate the alcohol the rats consumed to human quantities, but "based on their blood alcohol levels, the 2.5 percent ethanol diet was equivalent to a level of consumption that does not exceed [the] legal driving limit. This may be approximately one to two drinks per day for some people or two to three for others, depending upon their size, metabolism or genetic background..."

Among the normal rats, the animals that consumed moderate amounts of alcohol fared better on both tests compared with the teetotalers. Rats on a heavy alcohol diet did not do well on object recognition (and, in fact, showed signs of neurotoxicity), but they performed better than their normal brethren on the emotional memory task.

"People often drink to 'drown sorrows,'" Kalev says. "Our results suggest that this could actually paradoxically promote traumatic memories and lead to further drinking, contributing to the development of alcoholism."

Link

Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by nex , September 27, 2007 4:15 PM

[...] there may be a very good reason why we fail to keep our New Year's Resolutions [...] We can't remember what they are. Simple. And if we actually wrote them down, then we probably can't remember where we put the piece of paper, either. Oddly enough, the piece of paper has sometimes been known to turn up exactly a year later when you're casting around for something on which to write the next year's abortive attempts to pull your life into some kind of shape. This [...] is not a coincidence. [...]
It seems that the brain is affected by alcohol. Well, we know that, of course, and those who don't yet are about to find out. But there are different gradations to the effect, and herein lies the crux. The brain organises its memories like a kind of hologram [...] To retrieve an image, you have to re-create the exact conditions in which it was captured. [...] in the case of the brain it is, or can be (it turns out), the amount of alcohol sloshing around in it. [...] These memories are completely beyond the reach of your normal, sober mind. [...]

– Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, December 1999

#2 posted by philentropist , September 27, 2007 6:54 PM

There's a nice article on the salience model of dopamine here. Alcohol and other addictive drugs raise the level of dopamine in the brain. Researchers used to think that dopamine simply made people feel good, but evidence now suggests that it tells our brains that what we are experiencing is important to pay attention to, and to learn from, whether it is good or bad. From that perspective, this study makes a lot of sense.

#3 posted by David Pescovitz , September 27, 2007 9:01 PM

Thanks for that link, Philentropist!

#4 posted by nicheplayer