A team of Dutch researchers has found that just two glasses of wine can hinder your brain's ability to not only detect mistakes it makes, but also to correct them. The finding helps explain why drinking and driving is so dangerous - you may realise you’re driving down the wrong side of the motorway, but your brain can't quite figure out what to do about it.

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The researchers studied a group of people performing complicated tasks and found that alcohol hampered the function of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the brain that controls your ability to detect and correct errors.

What's a unit?
Two units of alcohol (one unit equals a 125ml glass of wine, 250ml of average strength beer, or a tot of spirits, or fortified wine such as sherry or port).

When drinking, it's good to remember that no matter how much coffee you drink, alcohol takes much longer to be metabolised by your body than it does to be ingested. Eating something before having a drink will help ensure that the alcohol takes longer to take affect.

Because alcohol is a diuretic, you should drink plenty of water. One good rule of thumb is to drink a pint of water for every unit of alcohol. That way you'll need plenty of trips to the toilet, leading to another rule of thumb: when you start going into the ladies' loo by mistake, it's time to switch to orange juice. - (William Smook)

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