It is commonly known that binge drinking can lead to blackouts. However, less publicised is the fact that alcohol consumption can also contribute to long term memory loss. Because alcohol is a depressant, the more one drinks, the more “depressed” brain activity becomes. The hippocampus, which is a structure in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, is crucial to the regulation of emotions and memory.
This was established in the 1950s, when Scoville and Milner discovered that an amnesiac patient known as HM was unable to retain new memories after large parts of his hippocampus were removed to control his seizures. He had, however, little trouble with relearning basic motor skills, and could recall older memories a year before the surgery.
This led to the conclusion, in a study supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, that alcohol “interferes with the ability to form new long-term memories, leaving intact previously established long-term memories and the ability to keep new information active in memory for brief periods”.
Alcohol-Induced Memory Loss Can Affect Studies, Career and Social Life
One could argue that examinations should be based on understanding various theories of each discipline, however it is undeniable that memory work plays a crucial role in achieving high grades. A 1997 research by the CORE Institute of 93,000 tertiary students revealed that the more a student drinks, the lower his grade point average. Students who often attain As have on average 4.21 drinks per week, whereas D and F students consume 9.97 drinks per week.
Alcohol can also impede one’s social skills – certainly, drinking can loosen tongues and lower inhibitions, but memory failure can manifest itself in embarrassing ways, such as losing one’s train of thought in the middle of a sentence, forgetting people’s names, constantly losing things, and such.
This condition is more severe among heavy alcohol consumers, according to a 2003 internet-based study published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. One of the researchers, Jonathan Ling, added that most of what is known about heavy drinkers' retrospective memory function is based on laboratory research, and even less is known about alcohol's effects on people’s everyday memory-related tasks.
Moderate Drinkers May Have Lower Risk of Dementia
While it is undisputed that binge drinking is detrimental to memory, recent studies show that moderate alcohol consumption may lower the risk of dementia. In 2003, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study which compared 373 dementia patients with 373 age-matched controls.
Among the significant findings was that people who drank one to six drinks per week were 54% less likely to have dementia than people who never consumed alcohol. In this study, one drink is operationalised as 12 oz of beer, 6 oz of wine or a shot of liquor. On the other side of the coin, heavy drinkers who consume more than 14 drinks a week have a 22% higher chance of dementia than people who abstain.
Different studies often contradict one another in regards to alcohol’s long-term effects on the brain or other physiological functions; however the one underlying similarity is that moderation is always the way to go. Responsible drinking will prevent unnecessary accidents, and may yet be beneficial to one’s health.
References:
- What Happened? Alcohol, Memory Blackouts, and the Brain - Aaron M. White
- Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions - William Beecher Scoville & Brenda Milner
- Effects of Alcohol on Subjective Ratings of Prospective and Everyday Memory Deficits - Ling, J.; Heffernan, T. M.; Buchanan, T.; Rodgers, J.; Scholey, A. B.; Parrott, A. C. Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. 27(6):970-974, June 2003.
- Prospective Study of Alcohol Consumption and Risk of Dementia in Older Adults - Mukamal, KJ; Kuller, LH; Fitzpatrick, AL; Longstreth, WT; Mittleman, MA; Siscovick, DS. JAMA. 2003; 289:1405-1413.
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