Just a few drinks can change how memories are formed
news.brown.edu
news.brown.edu
Is this not generally true? I like to hike, but a lot of times climbing a mountain is absolutely miserable, and I might be sore for some time afterword. Yet I always remember it as a great experience.
Or with past relationships, I have to try to remember the bad parts, but the good parts come easily.
But I'll never forget the sun rise up the flat Texas horizon from the tallest peak in the state. It was so beautiful and peaceful there. Clear skies, everything was perfect. I don't really remember the night before anymore, just that I need to pack some extra layers next time.
Every injury since (broken leg, broken collar bone, dislocated finger) has seemed like the worst pain I've ever experienced, but I know logically it can't be. And once I recover I forget the pain again.
Don’t get me wrong, I had some fun times on the stuff, but whenever I think about it all I remember is the worst and most terrible pain you could ever possibly imagine.
Also, really bad nausea.
Alcohol is a cheap, ubiquitous drug that helps us relax today, for a roughly proportionate cost which we can pay tomorrow (plus whatever longer-term costs like liver damage or memory formation which we can ignore or put off for even longer).
It's not confusing or unintuitive. Alcohol helps us relax. That's all it does! Which leads to all the other behaviors that are secondary to suddenly finding oneself relaxed. At first, a healthy relationship with alcohol is a perfectly reasonable transaction. I think it is normal that we would have fond memories of being relaxed, even in the midst of the mild hangover that would necessarily follow.
We easily get addicted to cheap methods for getting relaxed. Why wouldn't we? Especially if everyone around us is constantly using it to get relaxed. It's disgusting to witness! Unless you also use it to relax, in which case it suddenly becomes tolerable or even amusing.
You don't need much to relax (initially). Like with most drugs, eventually it is less potent and you require more. Also, like with any habit, your default baseline (in this case, your default relaxedness) starts to shift, so that eventually you are actively un-relaxed unless alcohol is present in your system. Obviously, as this continues, you need more and more alcohol, which is toxic pretty much in direct proportion to its volume.
Edit: added the sentence about hangovers, for clarity
While I like this metaphor I don't think it's really true. As long as you drink in moderation the relaxation benefits easily outweigh the negatives. Of course, the converse is also true, you can drink so much that the negatives dwarf the positives.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t drink at all, but just that you should be aware of the consequences because they are non-zero.
Could you post a source that shows alcohol relaxes you?
People commonly experience that effect as relaxation.
I drink maybe twice a month. It’s relaxing. I am in no sense addicted to alcohol.
Alcohol is primarily a GABAergic, so of course it’s relaxing. Habitual use will down-regulate those receptors, and the addictive cycle is triggered by medicating the resulting anxiety with more alcohol. None of this is surprising.
Alcohol can also carry many flavors and dissolve oils in suspension (it is a solvent, after all). This is one of the reasons whiskies have such diverse flavors. Many vanilla extracts are also around 35-40% abv (alcohol free versions use glycerin?... I think?).
Alcohol (wines for example) can also useful in cooking, where the alcohol is boiled off and some of the flavors and oils are left behind.
That's just silly. (I'd go into detail but I think it's sufficiently obvious.) Have you ever tried it?
Have some porridge and you'll feel great entire morning :)
I'm a strength athlete. Minor injuries are the norm, serious injuries are a guarantee if you lift long enough. I tore my meniscus a 14 months ago and kept on lifting and I have numerous friends that have delayed surgeries so that they could still compete in specific competitions.
It tears us up, it's miserable, but man it's worth every second of discomfort, every little bit of pain.
As for drinking, it was an excuse to act like an idiot and have some fun when I was younger I think. The hangovers did get much worse as I got older, so I rarely drink now and when I do I don't usually enjoy it that much.
In On Photography (I believe), Susan Sontag talks about how it has been a quintessentially American thing to ensure everyone was smiling in family snapshots. I wonder if cultures or families that tend to smile in photos end up taking more vacations because they misremember them as being better than they were.
I got drunk twice in my life. Once intentionally to see what it was like, and once by accident (thought I was having a couple beers, turns out they all had double the usual alcohol content so I was having twice what I thought I was having). Both experiences made me feel so bad that they were sort of traumatizing.
I’m not talking about the hangover (though that was awful too). The feeling of being drunk feels terrible to me. I feel like I’m losing control of myself. My face feels numb. People say that’s how it is, and I don’t understand how they can look forward to that.
One of my friends is a former alcoholic; he says that the sound of an aluminum can popping open feels like a religious moment. The sound is apparently so thoroughly associated with endless drinking and partying from his teenage years, that it triggers a brief rush of euphoria, followed by an immediate craving to drink a beer. He's talked about how the first time he was moderately intoxicated, it was the best feeling he'd ever had, both in an immediately euphoric sense, and in a deeper, comforting sort of way. "I just had this feeling that life was going to be all right," he says.
Scary stuff - and so very different from your experience.
Do most adults need to retain new information very often?(excluding the typical HN audience who are constantly learning/innovating/reading/etc)
That doesn't mean you couldn't benefit from doing better than that, though.
I do wonder occasionally who a parallel universe abstinent-me would be today. Would I have retained that deep focus excitability I had as a young teen? From a personal perspective it's difficult if not impossible to tell the effects of drinking years from the effects of years.
I think also "success" depends not only on individual performance, but also social connections. You can only get so far working on your own. At some point you need to be able to get along with other people, and alcohol does facilitate that to some extent.
Studies cited: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12683478 https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2353
This seems like a weird question, at least in relation to alcohol. The pleasurable experience of alcohol is not only remembered but enthusiastically attested to by people currently under the influence. People have no problem remembering hangovers and talk about them frequently, and the other negative health effects are separated in time from the consumption experience, which weakens the association. I suspect this person has an unusual personal reaction to alcohol, but if it leads him to original discoveries, more power to him.
original Joan Baez version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ST9TZBb9v8
Judas Priest version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OHJP1BSVgM
But... then I walked by this almost suspectly non-descript steel door at the bottom of a few stairs, and some part of my brain said "there is a secret club/lounge behind this door." It was kind of surreal. I hesitantly opened it, and what do you know... there we were.
And prototypically, marijuana. Back in the day, I'd always see movies stoned. That way, if I liked them, I could see them again freshly. And if I didn't liked them, I could forget about them more easily.
I've had a single moderate concussion, where one of my first memories afterwards is of sitting in the hospital emergency room with a couple friends. I had a notebook with my handwriting, containing several pages of questions/answers that my friends had me write down so they could stop repeating themselves to me.
Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position
Such a heavy burden now to be the one
Born to bear and bring to all the details of our ending
To write it down for all the world to see
But I forgot my pen
How's that for chance :)
If it only takes 3 drinks and has this effect you clearly can't metabolise alcohol well and have a genetic difference to others, because that's not a normal westerner's experience. Perhaps you have an enzyme difference along the chain of breakdown
Drugs and alcohol alleviate emotional pain and have physilogical "pleasure" effects in some cases. But most of the negative effects that are frequently talked about are physiological.
Apples shouldn't be compared to oranges. A good comparison would for example be to compare the pleasures of drugs against the emotional toll caused by the negative sociological effects (can't get jobs,stigma,less friends in some cases,unintended harm to loved ones,etc...)
People take medical drugs like anti-depressants all the time knowing full well long term use can have side effects and even in the short term there can be severe side effects.
I don't drink, and fortunately I've never worked in an office where that mattered, but my personal choices in consuming drugs should have no professional repercussions unless it negatively impacts my job performance.
Aside from this, I agree that the vast majority can enjoy these substances without destroying themselves, leading very productive lives with some of the evident downsides that even casual consumption can bring.
As we start to actually study the effects of alcohol, it really looks like it is a hard drug with no net positive effects at anything over a minuscule dose.
Space aliens looking at those numbers might even mistake alcohol for a mild contraceptive.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45283401
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Development_of_a_rat...
I think outlawing it now would be about as successful as the first Prohibition in the USA (i.e. not at all) but I do think it should be regulated more closely (e.g. very strong restrictions on alcohol advertising and perhaps plain packaging and black box warnings similar to cigarette packaging) and that the dangers of alcohol should be taught more widely.
Carbon monoxide, tar, and tiny soot particles are very bad for you. Nicotine? Not so much.
Addiction is annoying as hell and I don’t recommend it. But let’s be accurate.
>> https://subsaga.com/bbc/documentaries/science/how-we-got-to-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer
>At mealtimes in the Middle Ages, everyone could drink small beer, including children, while eating a meal at the table. Table beer was around this time typically less than 1% ABV.
"It was common for workers (including sailors) who engaged in heavy physical labor to drink more than 10 imperial pints (5.7 litres) of small beer during a workday to quench their thirst. Small beer was also drunk for its nutrition content; it might even have bits of wheat or bread suspended in it. Erasmus Darwin, in his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools of 1797, thought that "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer ...".[5] Larger educational establishments like Eton, Winchester, and Oxbridge colleges ran their own breweries.[6]"
On the most strenuous hikes or endurance activities that I have undertaken, I have vivid memories of the struggle, like I can remember feeling so thirsty and walking for most of the last 5K. I also remember how foolish was I to play an 18 hole the next day, without using a buggy (talk about male ego). By the time I reached the 18th hole I was about to pass out and collapse.
Nowadays I stay away from alcohol and just restrict myself to a single beer or a glass of wine. It takes me 4-5 pints to get buzzed and leaves me with a terrible headache later. Not a good sign.
The getting tipsy / drunk part is, of course, part of it and some people do go too far. It also has a lot of other problems but don’t lose sight that there is so much more to it than just getting drunk.
For example, there are plenty of non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated beverages, but few with as much subtle variety as alcoholic/caffeinated beverages. For example:
- kefir - kombucha (though it's pretty trendy these days) - probiotic drinks
Each of those has some variety, but I can find far more variety in pretty much any category of spirits (beer, wine, cider, hard liquor, etc) and caffeinated drinks (coffee, tea). I can find maybe a dozen varieties of the above, whereas I can find at least a dozen subcategories of wine or coffee, with tons of variation within each subcategory.
I have a hard time believing that the main attraction for coffee and alcohol connoisseurs is taste/texture/etc and not the drug inside the beverage. In other words, if the drug had no effect on humans, would there be a similar level of interest?
https://www.brewbound.com/news/brewers-large-and-small-take-...
Joke's on me eh?
All the non alcoholic wines I’ve tried have been pretty bad, more like a sweet vermouth. Can be made drinkable with some tonic water.
There is also a boom in distilled non alcoholic 'spirits' which can be OK. Again they don't have the depths of a spirit and tend to be quite light with wither floral or spicy notes. They are also expensive, Seedlip is one of the better ones but at £26 a bottle it's comparable to a decent quality spirit.
It's great that there has been so much development but they're still quite different drinks.
Oh my god, I remember why I left neuroscience now. Biology is just incomprehensibly, nauseatingly, complex.
That said, I don't have the same reaction to alcohol; the cravings when I regularly partake are stronger than the desire not to. I'm sure there's a whole spectrum of folks from averse to addiction, to easily addicted to anything.
I think this relates a lot here, people who are well aware of their emotions may observe the effects the drugs have on them, not just when they're high/coming down but also it's affects on their day to day lives.
It made me feel superhuman. Just knowing I would score some would get me excited.
But the more I times I took it, the more I would think of the terrible comedown. It got to the point where I wouldn’t touch the stuff without having weed and xanax on me.
Finally, I just got too scared of the comedown and stopped. All for the best I suppose (though I do take low doses of adderall or modafinil very occasionally for work if I feel like I’m about to fall asleep at my desk)
I know that sounds a bit woo woo but it's sort of an ineffable and inarticulable idea. I'm 100% sure I feel it though, every time I drink I sleep poorly, I'm much more irritable once the alcohol wears off the next afternoon, and by the time the evening comes around, assuming I don't re-dose, I'm much more prone to ruminate on negative thoughts or seek mindless stimulation to distract my mind from the general malaise.
I think alcohol really is a mainstream and socially acceptable means of anxiety self-medication. It's a deeply engrained cultural habit that has been around for millenia, and I don't expect or advocate for it to stop, but for me it has palpable deleterious effects on my whole being.