bob(from black rock) said:
Has anyone here had personal experience with this claim? which I got from this forum,I had been off all alcohol for about 15 years which gave me great improvements with prostate cancer test results, so it was with some reluctance that I went back to red wine, about half a bottle a day, and I can’t say this has helped my memory at all so far, should I stick with the red and run the risk of being back on the piss or not?
I’d be very wary of such claims. Alcohol is notorious for generally buggering up memory, including short-term memory.
Here’s Wiki on: Effects of alcohol on memory
Brain areas affected by alcohol
Alcohol affects brain functioning. Neurochemical changes occurring in the anterior cingulate are correlated with altered short-term memory functions in the brains of young alcoholic men. fMRIs of alcohol-dependent women displayed significantly less blood oxygen in the frontal and parietal regions, especially in the right hemisphere. This is supported by findings of short-term memory impairment by lesions of the parietal lobe and prefrontal cortex. Associations between Third ventricle volume and cognitive performance on memory tests have been found in alcoholics. Specifically, increases in third ventricular volume correlate with a decline in memory performance.
Tasks and intoxication findings
Short-term memory is commonly tested with visual tasks. Short-term memory, especially for non-verbal and spatial material, are impaired by intoxication. Alcohol decreases iconic memory (a type of visual short-term memory). With BACs between 80–84 mg/dl, more intrusion errors occur in a delayed recall task compared to a control group. Intrusion errors, which represent reflective cognitive functioning, occur when irrelevant information is produced. Alcoholics have less control of inhibiting intrusions. Acute alcohol intoxication in social drinkers caused more intrusion errors in delayed recall tasks than in immediate free recall tasks. Acute alcohol intoxication increases susceptibility to interference, which allows for more intrusion errors when there is a short delay. Free recall (given list of words then asked to recall list) is significantly lower and therefore impaired by alcohol intoxication. Encoding deficits were found in verbal free recall and recognition tasks under the influence of alcohol. A discrimination task found significant alcohol-related impairments in depth perception and in visual short-term memory. State-dependent learning and relearning studies in male heavy drinkers demonstrate that the condition of intoxication while learning and sobriety when tested caused a performance deficit in free recall tasks. These findings are supportive of alcohol-induced storage deficits (not retrieval deficits). The effects of acute alcohol consumption on visual short-term memory, stereoscopic depth perception, and attention were studied. A 33% alcohol condition showed significant impairments in depth perception and in visual short-term memory (assessed by the vernier discrimination task).
Working_memory_model.svg
Working Memory Model. Alcohol intoxication can disrupt rehearsal strategies which may involve the phonological loop and/or the visuospatial sketchpad.
Effects on working memory
Working memory allows one to keep things in mind while simultaneously performing complex tasks. It involves a system for the temporary storage and manipulation of information, forming a crucial link between perception and controlled action. Evidence suggests that working memory involves three components: the central executive which controls attention, the visuo-spatial sketchpad which holds and manipulates spatial information, and the phonological loop which performs a similar function for auditory and speech-based information.
In the short term
Alcohol consumption has substantial, measurable effects on working memory, though these effects vary greatly between individual responses. Little is known about the neural mechanisms that underlie these individual differences. It is also found that alcohol impairs working memory by affecting mnemonic strategies and executive processes rather than by shrinking the basic holding capacity of working memory. Isolated acute-moderate levels of alcohol intoxication do not profoundly physically alter the structures which are critical for working memory function, such as the frontal cortex, parietal cortex, anterior cingulate, and parts of the basal ganglia. One finding regarding the effects of alcohol on working memory points out that alcohol reduces working memory only in individuals with a high baseline working memory capacity., suggesting a universal suffering of working memory functionality is non-existent. Alcohol appears to impair the capacity of working memory to modulate response inhibition. Alcohol disinhibits behaviour, but only in individuals with a low baseline working memory capacity. An interesting finding is that incentive to perform well with working memory measurement tasks while under the influence of alcohol ‘does in fact have some effect on working memory, in that it boosts scores in rate of mental scanning and reaction time to stimulus, but did not reduce number of errors compared to subjects with no incentive to perform well. Even acute alcohol intoxication (a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08-0.09%) produces a substantial impairment of working memory processes that require mnemonic rehearsal strategies. Alcohol is less likely to impair a working memory task that does not rely on memory rehearsal or associated mnemonic strategies. Because of this, working memory is very susceptible to falter when a person is participating in tasks involving retention concerning auditory and visual sequences. A real world and interesting example of this is failure of guitarists or other musicians performing concerts to cue in on auditory patterns and make it known that their performance is hindered by intoxication, whereas professional basketball (a less sequence-heavy activity for working memory) standout Ron Artest recently admitted in an interview with Sporting News to drinking heavily during half-time in the early days of his career and it having little if any recognizable effect on his working memory. His former coach Fran Fraschilla has gone on record saying:
“It’s a surprise because every day at practice, he came out in a mood to play. He came out in a basketball rage. He was fully committed; he wanted to let our upperclassmen know that he was the alpha male. It never came up that he had any sort of a problem with alcohol. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
In the long term
Alcohol has shown to have some long-term effect on working memory. Findings have shown that for working memory to be substantially affected, long-term, heavy drinking must be sustained over a long period of time as up to one drink per day does not impair cognitive function and may actually decrease the risk of cognitive decline. Furthermore, chronic alcoholism is associated with impairment in sustained attention and visual working memory. Thus, alcoholics have reduced ability, but not necessarily inability, to perform these executive tasks, assumed to be subserved by regions of prefrontal cortex. While it may not serve as a surprise that chronic alcoholism has been linked to decreased cognitive function including working memory, one surprising finding is not only that even moderate levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy were shown to have an adverse effect on the child’s working memory when tested at 7.5 years of age, but that working memory may be the most important aspect of attention that is adversely affected by prenatal alcohol exposure.
A lot more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_alcohol_on_memory