How Alcohol Memories are Triggered in Sobriety (E61)
Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcasting app: Apple Spotify Other Apps
Gill discusses how alcohol memories are triggered in sobriety. She had an unexpected encounter with $28 all you can drink wine recently, and this triggered an urge and all those weird thoughts about drinking. She found some very interesting studies about where drinking memories might be stored, how they become activated and lead to relapse, and why these drinking memories get triggered during sobriety. It can be very frustrating after a lot of sober time to have urges pop up, so hopefully this episode helps you understand why this happens and reinforces that you can never change the way you drink and it will never be “long enough”.
Key Takeaways
Several clinical and preclinical studies have identified the medial prefrontal cortex as a key player in relapse and alcohol and drug seeking behavior. Brain imaging studies on people with alcohol use disorder found increased activation of the medial prefrontal cortex in response to alcohol cues and that this activation correlated with increased risk of relapse. In animal models, reexposure to alcohol cues set off alcohol seeking behavior and resulted in enhanced activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.
The medial prefrontal cortex plays a role in decision making, conflict monitoring, error detecting, executive functioning, reward-guided learning, and weighing the risk vs the reward. It also plays a role in retrieval of memories. Many different studies in humans, monkeys, and rodents have found that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex is linked to the subjective value of anticipated outcomes.
The purpose of the medial prefrontal cortex assisting with memory is to select the correct emotional or motor response to a situation using information from past experiences. So what this means to me is that when we’re in a situation, the medial prefrontal cortex assesses it and compares it to previous situations then determines how we should feel about it and what we should do. If we’re in a situation where alcohol is present and we have the ability to drink it, then the brain processes this and determines that we should want to drink because we always have in the past and we associate drinking with rewarding outcomes.
Sources
O’Brien, J. Alcohol Addiction Relapse Might Be Thwarted By Turning Off Brain Trigger. UC San Francisco. 2013.
Visser, E., Matos, M., van der Loo, R., et al. A persistent alcohol cue memory trace drives relapse to alcohol seeking after prolonged abstinence. Sci Adv. 2020.
Bontempi B, Laurent-Demir C, Destrade C, Jaffard R. Time-dependent reorganization of brain circuitry underlying long-term memory storage. Nature. 1999 Aug 12;400(6745):671-5.
Euston DR, Gruber AJ, McNaughton BL. The role of medial prefrontal cortex in memory and decision making. Neuron. 2012;76(6):1057-1070. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2012.12.002
Cite this episode
Tietz, G. Episode 61: How Alcohol Memories are Triggered in Sobriety. Sober Powered. 2021.
