Should I Take All My Tests Drunk? State-Dependent Retrieval

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The human brain is one of the most fascinating things in the world in my opinion. It handles, creates, determines, and processes literally everything we do. It can do some of the most amazing things we've ever seen. There are certain aspects of the human brain that are truly baffling and interesting. One such phenomenon is learning and how we come to know, learn, and remember things. Specifically, how brains associate certain states of mind with certain responses. 

Our brains are very good at associating things we aren't aware we're experiencing with recalling information. For example a certain smell can bring us back to a certain time in our life, triggering certain memories. The smell of freshly baked cookies can instantly transport you to the time your mom was making cookies and you told her about a praying mantis you saw outside earlier eating another one (weird I know, but it’s the first example I could think of, go with it). That's how your brain encoded that information, so now the smell of cookies baking will be associated with this piece of information you encoded in your memory, allowing easier recall when you reintroduce that stimulus. That’s why you’re so confused when you smell cookies and you automatically think of praying mantises eating its mate. Another example is that you may remember a time you were riding your bike in the rain, and you lost control and fell off it, hurting your leg badly. Now your brain has encoded the rain in association with this injury, potentially making you hate rainy days, as it reminds you of your injury even if you don’t realize it consciously.

These are basic examples of how incredible the brain is at taking into consideration our state of mind and surroundings when we're encoding information, so that when we go to retrieve it, we can use shortcuts to get to that information quickly. The mating habits of praying mantises is now located in your brain near what cookies smell like. The pain of hurting your leg while riding a bike is now associated with the sound of rain. These heuristics make your brain work much more efficiently, as it can access and retrieve information based on the stimuli it was associated with. 

This same principle is also present with other states of mind. Let's go back to college for a second. Do you remember playing your first game of beer pong? No? That's fine but for the sake of the example pretend - like me - that you went out and partied a lot in college. Just starting out playing the game at the beginning of the night, you're not doing too well. You're missing cups just about every shot you take. However as the night goes on and you get the hang of it more, you get more intoxicated and you notice yourself making more cups than you were at the beginning of the night! You feel your muscles more easily going to the right positions and executing the right amount of force and follow through with your shots. There's actually some validity when people say you're better at beer pong the more intoxicated you are due to state-dependent retrieval.

State-dependent retrieval is the idea that you will recall and retrieve information better when you're in the state of mind you were in when you encoded that information. According to James Eric Eich of the University of Toronto and the National Institute of Mental Health in his article State-Dependent Retrieval of Information in Human Episodic Memory, people are able to recall information significantly more accurately and faster when intoxicated, if the information was encoded while in an intoxicated state. He finds that the contexts in which the information was learned are exceedingly important to the encoding and retrieval process. Recreating those conditions can often result in substantially higher levels of retention of information. (It should be noted that in this study Eich actually did not test alcohol as an independent variable, but sites past research that has, as well as used drugs that have very similar responses in the brain to alcohol.)

"Now wait just a minute," you might be thinking. "Does this mean that if I study for a test drunk, I'll be able to remember the material better if I take the test drunk?" Well technically, yes. Because you're recreating the conditions in which you studied the material, your brain is now able to recall that information better than if you weren't intoxicated while taking the test. If you're in the same state of mind you were when you encoded the information, your brain can lean on some of the same shortcuts for the retrieval of that information like it does when remembering the mating habits of praying mantises. 

However, this does not mean you should go and get belligerent for every test you take from now on. Eich actually recommends against this because he found in that same study that high levels of intoxication can produce severe long term retention deficits that obscure any of the association effects that could be gained. In other words, binge drinking for all your tests will only cause more long term damage to your retrieval abilities, than if you were to just study and take your tests as normal. Eich conducted another study with his some of his colleagues that tests this very phenomenon. They find that those who studied for a test sober and took the test sober had the exact same results as those who studied for a test intoxicated and took the test intoxicated (this study did examine alcohol). This means that because there's only a risk you could potentially harm your encoding and retrieval processes in the long term, just study and take the test sober. 

"Okay, so if I can't use this information to take tests drunk what's the point?" you may be thinking to yourself (although I hope not). The important take away from all of this is that your state of mind influences how well you remember and recall things. If you're extremely depressed while you're trying to engage in a creative outlet like making music or writing, you'll be able to remember that music or piece of writing much better during recall when you're similarly depressed. Likewise, when you're having the best day and are very happy while learning new information like a new coding function, you'll be able to recall that information much more easily during recall when you're happy. The state itself isn't really what matters when retrieving information. It's the congruence of the state between encoding and retrieving that yields the best results. As long as the state you're in when retrieving information is the same as when you encoded it, you’ll have a substantially easier time retrieving that information. 

Our minds are breathtakingly incredible. The state of mind we’re in has an exceedingly important role in the development and recollection of our memories. We’ll recall information better when we are in the same state we were in when it was encoded. This means you’ll likely be better at beer pong when you’re more intoxicated, you’ll be able to remember that amazing metaphor you thought of when you were down more easily when you’re having a particularly bad day, and you’ll always remember that praying mantises bite off one another’s heads after mating when you smell cookies. Paying more attention to the conditions we’re in when we’re trying to encode information can help us recall that information much more easily by taking advantage of these implicit brain processes.