A good reason to raise a glass

Drinking alcohol can improve memory, report researchers in the journal Scientific Reports. In their study, 88 adults were asked to learn new words, then told to either drink as many alcoholic beverages as they wanted or not drink at all. When they repeated the same task 24 hours later, those who had drunk the alcohol the day before performed 27 percent better on a test of their memory of the new words; teetotalers’ scores fell by 10 percent. The study authors theorize that alcohol helps the hippocampus—the area of the brain linked to memory—solidify recently learned information into long-term memory.