Drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better

Scientists have found that repeated ethanol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in a key area of the brain. This is further evidence toward an emerging consensus in the neuroscience community that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder. In an important sense, alcoholics aren't addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They're addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain. People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it's a learning transmitter.