A new study from University of Exeter in Britain has claimed that use of alcohol may improve memory and help people remeber more numvber of things.Read how:
According to research:
- The researchers are, however, keen to stress that this limited positive effect should be considered
- alongside the well-established negative effects of excessive alcohol on memory and mental and physical health.
- Although the cause of this effect is not yet known, the researchers explained that alcohol blocks
- the learning of new information and, therefore, the brain has more resources available
- to lay down other recently learned information into long-term memory.
- “The theory is that the hippo-campus brain area is really important in memory
- This switches to ‘consolidating’ memories, transferring from short into longer-term memory,” said Celia Morgan, Professor at University of Exeter.
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- For the study, 88 social drinkers (31 males and 57 females, aged 18-53) were given a word-learning task.
- Participants were then split in two groups at random and told either to drink as much as they liked or not to drink at all.
- 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 a second task, the participants were asked to look at images on a screen.
- This task was completed once after the drinkers had drunk alcohol and again the following day, and the results did not reveal significant differences in memory performance post-drinking.
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