Question: Hi, I would like to know if certain drugs such as sleeping tablets and painkillers could affect memory and on what scale?

Nadine Mirza answered on 11 Nov 2018:

Hi! I’m sorry it’s taken time to get to this question- I wanted to find you the most accurate answer!
The short answer is yes. Because drugs and such tablets effect your brain chemistry, they can indeed effect memory. Obviously depending on what it is and the dosage it effects it in different ways.
When it comes to sleeping pills, they’ve been known to impact the memory processes that occur when we sleep. Normally, during REM sleep especially, our brain not only takes the time to turn short term memories into long term memories but also helps our brain make way for new memories. Sleep pills interfere with this, preventing the formation of long term memories and less room for new ones. There’s more info on this here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleep-newzzz/201403/do-sleeping-pills-undermine-sleep-s-memory-boosting-power
Taking a sleeping pill once in a while is not likely to do much. But very regularly can impact our memory processing in sleep.
With painkillers, it depends on the type. Standard pain killers, like paracetamol and ibuprofen, aren’t likely to have any kind of memory effect when taken properly.
However, prescription pain medication, particularly opiates, can and do have a negative effect. Opiates, which are designed to trick the brain to thinking it’s not in pain, depress or slow down the brain- they make our breathing shallow, our speech slurred, and in the case of memory, we process them less and slower. That means we’re storing less memories into our long term and we’re perceiving and processing short term memory slower.
I hope that answers your question!