Your Brain On Tylenol

Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, does a pretty good job of relieving pain, but it also does some other things, like make it hard to spot an error that would otherwise be readily apparent. We know this because researchers at the University of Toronto gave two groups of 30 a target-detection task called the Go or No Go, in which players were asked to hit a Go button every time the letter F flashed on a screen but refrain from hitting the button if an E flashed on the screen. As reported in a University of Toronto news release, each player was hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain, as researchers looked for a particular wave called Error Related Negativity (ERN) and Error Related Positivity (Pe). That’s because when people are hooked up to an EEG and make an error in the task there is a robust increase in ERN and Pe. Got that? OK, the envelope please….the group that was given 1,000 mg of acetaminophen – the equivalent of a normal maximum dose – showed a smaller Pe when making mistakes than those who didn’t receive a dose, suggesting that acetaminophen inhibits our awareness of the error. End of story.