KEY POINTS:
"Tonight the bottle let me down," the old Merle Haggard song says. "And let your memory come around." But the country classic about a man drinking to forget the woman who left him may be in need of a retread.
A study by University of Auckland researchers has found that alcohol makes it harder, not easier, to forget extreme emotion. The study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, reports that moderate alcohol consumption - defined as being up to but not over the legal driving limit - does not impair memory function and may even improve it.
Heavy drinking does impair memory function by decreasing the ability of new brain cells to develop and mature - and that's long-term, irreparable damage, not just the "I can't remember anything of what happened last night" effect.
But the big news is that drinking to forget looks like a waste of time. The researchers say that we have an inbuilt capacity to expunge, over time, memories of traumatic experience; if we didn't, no one who had had a car accident would be able to get in a car again. But heavy drinking may interfere with this capacity and actually enhance negative memory: drinking to forget may be drinking to remember.
The drift of the research, by Dr Maggie Kalev and Professor Matthew During, is to look for treatments for memory disorders. But their findings should explode the heavy drinker's excuse that it's a way of blotting out the bad times. Best to drink by the adage: everything in moderation, including moderation. And make sure you stay sharp enough to remember that you need to get a taxi home.
