Top Stories - Posted by Tim Green-U. Texas on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 11:16 - 10 Comments 
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(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Is alcoholism a learning disorder?
The common view that drinking is bad for learning and memory isn't wrong, says neurobiologist Hitoshi Morikawa, but it highlights only one side of what alcohol consumption does to the brain. (Credit: iStockphoto)
U. TEXAS-AUSTIN (US) — While having a few drinks may not help you remember your colleague’s name, alcohol can prime your subconscious brain to learn.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” says Hitoshi Morikawa, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin whose results were published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Morikawa says alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like “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.”
Morikawa’s study, which found that repeated alcohol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in a key area in the brain, is further evidence toward an emerging consensus in the neuroscience community that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder.
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 subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.
In an important sense, Morikawa says, alcoholics aren’t addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They’re addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.
“People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it’s a learning transmitter,” Morikawa says. “It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released.”
Alcohol, in this model, is the enabler. It hijacks the dopaminergic system, and it tells our brain that what we’re doing at that moment is rewarding (and thus worth repeating).
Among the things we learn is that drinking alcohol is rewarding. We also learn that going to the bar, chatting with friends, eating certain foods and listening to certain kinds of music are rewarding. The more often we do these things while drinking, and the more dopamine that gets released, the more “potentiated” the various synapses become and the more we crave the set of experiences and associations that orbit around the alcohol use.
Morikawa’s long-term hope is that by understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of addiction better, he can develop anti-addiction drugs that would weaken, rather than strengthen, the key synapses. And if he can do that, he would be able to erase the subconscious memory of addiction.
“We’re talking about de-wiring things,” Morikawa says. “It’s kind of scary because it has the potential to be a mind controlling substance. Our goal, though, is to reverse the mind controlling aspects of addictive drugs.”
More news from the University of Texas: www.utexas.edu/news/
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10 Comments
emc2
There are already drugs to eliminate the reward associated with, for example, nicotine. From what I’ve seen, addicts avoid those drugs like the plague. The last thing they want is to lose those ‘happy’ associations (with smoking, drinking). There has to be something to replace those associations, like, the rewards of a life well lived. What is that, anyway?
That’s a fervent angle by which to view a debilitating disease. It makes sense though, and explains why addicts continuously gravitate back to their personal abyss. However, what about the ones that drink alone, depressively in isolation? Where do they solicit their ‘rewarding experience’ associated with Dopamine release? What are the triggers that hold them down and locked in their cycle of self-devastation? Surely if there is no “going to the bar, chatting with friends, eating certain foods and listening to certain kinds of music” or other enhancing activities done whilst under the influence that end in a ‘rewarding experience’, then why do they too remain trapped?
Stevo – good question. I’m not an alcoholic, but I drink some and like booze. I am a smoker also. One reason I say I’m not an alcoholic is that I don’t get distressed when there’s no alcohol in the house and won’t go out of my way to replenish the supply.
But being down to my last cigarette? Oh yeah… I will get dressed and go out at 3am in a snowstorm.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that I also use smoking to escape people. I actually like that part about all the non-smoking fervor. It keeps people away! Though I don’t know, I suspect that for some drinkers there is a similar reward in being alone. Those who have been harangued about their drinking (as smokers have been about smoking) who also enjoy being alone anyway could feel rewarded drinking in solitude.
kailyn
cool
kailyn
alcohol is bad for u but many people may like it
Robert Reed
Surely a “life well lived” can include enjoying a pint or two of good, local beer along with good, local food in the company of people you like and who like you (your enablers).
The US spends 85 billion dollars every year on beer alone….surely I am correct.
As for you smokers though…..mind control drugs up the ying-yang!
xo,
R
Ilkka
Alcohol is not bad if you can use it correctly AND you are not alcoholist.
For alcoholist alcohol is bad because alcoholist can not drink one or two we can’t stop drinking.
Alcohol is thing for relax only!
Christine
I wonder if the majority of people who stop drinking, begin isolating themselves – partly out of not knowing what else to do, but because they don’t get the same pleasure as before, so they get bored and quit any human interactiion? Just stands to reason why they become more depressed because they are decreasing the dopamine in their own brains, and spiral downwards as they age. So, the key is to transition them into doing other activites as they quit over time, and reward themselves each week or so by celebrating not going to the bars, parties, etc, with a small gift they want – like a movie or manicure. The other thing to do is put all that money that would have been spent on drugs and alcohol into a bank account vacation plan for the family, or the friends who quit with you, To Celebrate is most important
That article had more of an impact on me than any anti drug add I’ve ever seen.