Life Stories How Alcohol Can Affect Your Memory May 07, 2019 | Rouella Midel-Bagiscan Share on Facebook Alcohol has been known to influence our mind and memory. Can we really forget something that has happened when we are under the influence of alcohol? How does it alter our brain? Alcohol can actually alter our memory in surprising ways. How Memory Works Our memory works on three different layers: encoding, retrieval, and storage. Encoding is when we give our attention to something, take note of it, and recover it from storage after. So when we’re distracted or we don’t pay attention, we won’t possibly record it. Advertisement Advertisement Encoding: Not Always So Easy Drinking interferes with how our brains “encode.” Our motor function becomes slow and we feel more relaxed, social, impulsive, and emotional. Basically, our ge...