This guy is about to get some learning done.

A new study has found that drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better. In a nutshell, when we drink alcohol our subconscious is learning to consume more of everything around us.

And if, like me, you thought the study was conducted by some tabloid newspaper, think again. Scientists from the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at The University of Texas is behind this, and the results have been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa explains:

“The common view that drinking is bad for learning and memory isn’t wrong, but it highlights only one side of what ethanol consumption does to the brain. Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning. But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability,’ at that level.”

But it doesn’t stop with only alcohol. According to Dr. Hitoshi, it works with other drugs as well:

“When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn’t stop there. We become more receptive to forming subconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations. People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it’s a learning transmitter. It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released.”

Somewhere, Hunter S. Thompson must be cracking a smile.

[Source: Science Daily]