Insights \ Health Hits

When I drink too much, I tend to have trouble remembering important things: What I was trying to say, where I am, and occasionally, my name. But a new study out of the University of Texas suggests that some alcohol consumption may actually help us remember--just not in necessarily a good way.

In the study, researchers at the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research found that repeated exposure to ethanol helps us form subconscious bonds with food, music, people and social situations.

When drinking, we might forget our boss' name (a bad thing) or where we parked our car (probably a good thing), but the brain is busy learning that things we do while we drink--going to a restaurant, enjoying music, talking to friends eating certain foods--are rewarding activities, says neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa.

"Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we're talking about conscious memory," says Morikawa, whose results were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. "But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn at that level."

Marikawa says alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain--but dopamine isn't all about pleasure. "People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it's a learning transmitter," Morikawa says. "It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released."

Researchers hope that understanding this relationship in addicts and alcoholics will help develop better treatment.

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