You’ve heard the phrase “it all came flooding back,” or you recognize the sensation of a quiz answer being “on the tip of your tongue” before it suddenly occurs to you? That’s what’s happening here. The memory that caused all this recognition has now received enough stimulation and is finally activated, the neighbor’s fireworks have woken those living in the house and they’ve turned all the lights on, so all the associated information is now available. Your memory is officially jogged, the tip of your tongue can resume its normal duties of tasting things rather than providing an unlikely storage space for trivia.
Overall, faces are more memorable than names because they’re more “tangible,” whereas remembering someone’s name is more likely to require full recall than simple recognition. I hope this information means that you’ll understand that if we ever meet for a second time and I don’t remember your name, I’m not being rude.
Actually, in terms of social etiquette, I probably am being rude. But now at least you know why.
A glass of wine to refresh your memory
(How alcohol can actually help you remember things)
People like alcohol. So much so that alcohol-related issues are an ongoing problem for many populations. These issues can be so widespread and constant that dealing with them ends up costing billions.12 So why is something so damaging also so popular?
Probably because alcohol is fun. Aside from causing a dopamine release in the areas of your brain dealing with reward and pleasure (see Chapter 8), thus causing that weird euphoric buzz that social drinkers enjoy so much, there’s also social convention built up around alcohol; it’s almost a mandatory element of celebration, bonding and just general recreation. Because of this, you can see why the more detrimental effects of alcohol are regularly overlooked. Sure, hangovers are bad, but comparing and laughing about the severity of respective hangovers is yet another way of bonding with friends. And the ridiculous ways in which people behave when drunk would be deeply alarming in some contexts (in a school, perhaps, at 10 a.m.) but when everyone does it, it’s just fun, right? A necessary relief from the seriousness and conformity demanded of us by modern society. So, yes, the negative aspects of alcohol are considered a price worth paying by those who enjoy it.
One of these negative aspects is memory loss. Alcohol and memory loss go hand in unsteady hand. It’s a comedy staple in sitcoms, stand-up and even personal anecdotes, usually involving someone waking up after a drunken night and finding himself in an unexpected situation, surrounded by traffic cones, unfamiliar garments, snoring strangers, irate swans and other things that wouldn’t be in a person’s bedroom under normal circumstances.
So how then can alcohol possibly actually help your memory, as the title of this bit suggests? Well, it’s necessary to go over why alcohol affects our brain’s memory system in the first place. After all, we ingest countless different chemicals and substances every time we eat anything, why don’t they cause us to slur our words or pick fights with lamp-posts?
It’s due to the chemical properties of alcohol. The body and brain have several levels of defence to stop potentially harmful substances entering our systems (stomach acids, complex intestinal linings, dedicated barriers to keep things out of the brain . . .) but alcohol (specifically ethanol, the type we drink) dissolves in water and is small enough to pass through all these defences, so the alcohol we drink ends up spread throughout our bodily systems via the bloodstream. And when it builds up in the brain, several bags of wrenches are thrown into some very important workings.
Alcohol is a depressant.13 Not because it makes you feel dreadful and depressed the next morning (although, good lord, it does), but because it actually depresses activity in the nerves of the brain; it reduces their activity like someone lowering the volume on a stereo. But why would this make people behave in more ridiculous ways? If brain activity is reduced, shouldn’t drunk people just sit there quietly and drool?
Yes, some drunk people do precisely this, but remember that the countless processes the human brain is carrying out every waking moment require not just making things happen, but preventing things from happening. The brain controls pretty much everything we do, but we can’t do everything all at once, so much of the brain is dedicated to inhibition and stopping activation of certain brain areas. Think of the way traffic is controlled in a large city; it is a complex job, relying on stop signs or red traffic lights to some degree. Without them the city would grind to a messy halt in a matter of minutes. Similarly, the brain has countless areas that provide important and essential functions but only when needed. For example, the part of your brain that moves your leg is very important, but not when you’re trying to sit in a meeting, so you need another part of the brain to say, “Not now, buddy,” to the leg-controlling part.
Under the influence of alcohol, the red traffic lights are dimmed or switched off in the brain regions that normally keep giddiness, euphoria and anger in check or suppressed. Alcohol also shuts down the areas responsible for speech clarity or walking coordination.14
It is worth noting that our simpler, fundamental systems, controlling things such as heart rate, are deeply entrenched and robust, whereas the newer, more sophisticated processes are more easily disrupted or damaged by alcohol. There are similar parallels in modern technology; you could drop a 1980s Walkman down a flight of stairs and it might still work, but tap a smartphone on the corner of a table and you end up with a hefty repair bill. Sophistication results in vulnerability, it seems.
So with the brain and alcohol, “higher” functions are the first to go. Things like social restraint, embarrassment and the little voices in our head that say, “This probably isn’t a good idea.” Alcohol silences these pretty quickly. When you’re drunk you’re more likely to say what’s on your mind or take a crazy risk just to get a laugh, such as agreeing to write an entire book about the brain.15
The last things to be disrupted by alcohol (and it has to be a lot to get to this point) are the basic physiological processes, such as heart rate and breathing. If you’re so drunk you get into this state, you’ll probably lack sufficient brain function to be capable of being worried, but you really really should be.16
Between these two extremes, there’s the memory system, which is technically both fundamental and complex. Alcohol seems to have a particular tendency to disrupt the hippocampus, the main region for memory formation and encoding. It can also limit your short-term memory, but it’s the long-term memory disruption via the hippocampus that causes the worrying gaps when you wake up the next day. It’s not a complete shutdown of course; memories are usually still being formed, but less efficiently and more haphazardly.17