For many of us, the dangers of excessive alcohol drinking has been drilled into our brains since a young age. Drinking irresponsibly can lead to poor decision-making: everything from getting behind the wheel of a car to sickness and alcohol poisoning, and hangovers that lead you to make false promises that you’ll "never drink again."

But a new study shows there’s another permanent consequence that results from binge drinking, specifically when you’re young. The study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, found that repeated alcohol exposure during adolescence leads to long-term damage to the brain’s memory and learning functions.

To conduct the study, Duke University Medical School’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences repeatedly exposed adolescent rodents to alcohol, and then stopped the exposure when the rats reached adulthood, monitoring the resulting brain activity at the cellular level.

What happened? The exposure of the rats’ not-fully-developed brains to alcohol made the animals stupid. "Repeated alcohol exposure…resulted in long-lasting changes to the region of the brain that controls learning and memory," deduced the study. In other words, "It’s quite possible that alcohol disrupts the maturation process, which can affect…cognitive function later on," says lead author and post-doctoral researcher, Mary-Louis Risher.

And if you're all, "Well, I’m older than 18, so there’s nothing I can do about that now,” as far as this study is concerned, adolescence spans a greater range. According to Risher, the brain continues to mature and develop well into your mid-20s, which means, medically speaking, that adolescence is far from over when you turn 18. This is why binge drinking is especially bad for you during that time. "It’s important for young people to know that when they drink heavily during this period of development, there could be changes occurring that have a lasting impact on memory and other cognitive functions,” Risher told Science Daily.

So the next time you're at a friends house in high school or that frat party in college, think about it before you reach for that third drink. That woozy feeling might end up lasting longer than just the night.

Related: 11 Things Every Girl Should Know About Sex and Sexual Assault in College

Check out Teen Vogue’s November issue cover star, Emma Roberts.