Drinking alcohol activate certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better, as those found in a recent study from the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at The University of Texas at Austin.
The general view that drinking alcohol is bad for learning and memory is not wrong, says neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa expert, but this study highlights only one side of the consumption of ethanol into the brain.
"Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we're talking about conscious memory," said Morikawa, who announced his research last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. "Alcohol reduces our ability to hold on to pieces of information such as your colleague's name, or definition of a word, or where you parked the car this morning. But our subconscious as well do the learning and remembering, and alcohol can actually improve our ability to learn or 'kondisibilitas', at that level. "
Morikawa study, which found that repeated exposure to ethanol increases the plasticity of synapses in key areas in the brain, is further evidence of the presence of consensus in the neuroscience community where drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a disorder of learning and memory.
When we drink alcohol (or using heroin, cocaine or smoke, or drink methamphetamine), our subconscious are learning to consume more. But it does not stop there. We become more open to form a subconscious memory and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.
In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics are not addicted to the experience of pleasure or help them get it from drinking alcohol. They are addicted to the constellation of environmental cues, behavioral and physiological reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.
"People usually think of dopamine as a transmitter happiness, or pleasure transmitter, but also more accurate transmitters of learning," Morikawa said. "It strengthens the synapses-sipnasis active when dopamine is released."
Alcohol, in this model, is the pusher. He hijacked the dopaminergic system, and the brain tells us that what we are doing at the time was pengimbalan (and thus worthy of repeated).
Among the things we learned is that drinking alcohol is pengimbalan. We also learn that going to the bar, chatting with friends, eating certain foods and listening to certain type of music is pengimbalan. The more often we do something while drinking alcohol, and more dopamine is released, the more "mempotensasikan" various synapses and the more we crave set of experiences and associations that orbit around the use of alcohol.
Hope Morikawa long term is that by better understanding the neurobiological basis of addiction, he can develop anti-addiction drugs that will weaken rather than strengthen, the key synapses. And if he can do that, he will be able to erase the subconscious memory of addiction.
"We're talking about things-cable termination," Morikawa said. "It's a little scary because it has the potential to become a substance that controls the mind. Nevertheless, our goal is to reverse the mind control that mengaspek addictive drug
Sources: Alcohol Helps the Brain Remember, Says New Study (utexas.edu)B. E. Bernier, L. R. Whitaker, H. Morikawa. Previous Ethanol Experience Enhances Synaptic Plasticity of NMDA Receptors in the Ventral Tegmental Area. Journal of Neuroscience, 2011; 31 (14): 5205 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5282-10.2011
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