Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

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> The older I get the more sensitive to a single poor night's sleep I become.

Can relate.

> The most frustrating effect is that even a few drinks in the evening (maybe over 2-3 units). Unsettles my sleep that if I'm in the process of learning something feels like it sets me back several days.

I'm not noticing it unsettles my learning but can relate to a few drinks already upsetting my sleep. I wouldn't be surprised if my learning would be impaired by at least a bit.

> When I was younger I'm not sure I had many good nights sleep let alone noticed a bad one!

Being young is a blessing that way.

I'm +35 years old by the way.

> I've heard that small amounts of alcohol can actually improve learning interestingly by preventing interference from events later in the day.

Do you have a source? Would be curious to look some of it up.

I'm in a similar age bracket.

Here is some research around the alcohol effect. What I found most surprising is the mean consumption was over 80g, since 8g of ethanol is a unit that's an astonishing mean of 10units.

I was of the impression that the effect was around 1 unit.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5524957/

While there's no consistent standard, most countries appear to be using something in the 10-14g range for what they call a "standard drink"/"unit" of alcohol. (UK is 8g, but the rest of the EU typically uses 10g or 12g, US uses 14g).

I actually hadn't realized until I went looking that the "standard drink" isn't much of an international standard unit at all. Will have to keep that in mind when reading papers/recommendations from different health authorities in the future.

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Anyway, it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure I'm going to believe the effect just on one noisy study, but even if the reality is something lesser - like it just not harming memory formation of things you'd learned earlier in the day, the implications are still a bit interesting.

It certainly adds a bit to some of the historical social biases against "day drinking", and also does a bit to explain how plenty of high-performing young people seem to use alcohol pretty heavily after they're done learning (college students partying, etc) with limited direct impacts on their educational performance.

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