Alcohol helps memory

Add this to Glenn’s “is there nothing it can’t do?” list:

“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” says Morikawa, whose results were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. “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.”

Caffeine is known to help alertness, of course, but also improves performance in a number of areas, and coffee has a number of good health effects. It kind of sounds like businesses should have Irish coffee breaks.