September 11, 2011 by Infowars Ireland
PressTV
September 11, 2011
A new study conducted at the University of California says women who use birth control pills remember emotional events differently than women who don't.
"What's most exciting about this study is that it shows the use of hormonal contraception alters memory," said UCI graduate researcher Shawn Nielsen.
The study indicates that medications do not hurt memory or cause a deficit, but induce a change in the type of information that is remembered, Science Daily reported.
Birth control pills cause lower levels of the reproductive hormones progesterone and estrogen, which are linked to women's "strong" left brain memory.
"This new finding may be surprising to some, but it's a natural outgrowth of the research we've been doing on sex differences for 10 years," said neurobiologist Larry Cahill whose study had shown that men and women remember things differently.
The fact that women on oral contraceptives remembered different elements of a story clarifies that estrogen affects how women remember emotional events, researchers say.
Nielsen and fellow researcher Nicole Ertman believe that the findings could lead them to identify how men remember differently than women as they typically rely more on right-hemisphere brain activity to encode memory.
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