The next day, you probably woke up dehydrated with a headache and a hangover. But you could probably remember everything you did, with a little effort and reminders. While we are unable to respond to your feedback directly, we’ll use this information to improve our online help. But I’ve accepted that I won’t get any of my lost memories back—because what choice do I have? And I’m focused on remembering everything else about the rest of my life. I never found out the answers, but that didn’t stop me from drinking to such an extent that over the next 20 years, I regularly woke up with blank spaces where memories should have been.
What Happens to the Body During a Blackout?
People experiencing alcohol poisoning have additional dangerous symptoms, such as vomiting and severe sedation. If you keep drinking during a blackout, you could experience an overdose. If you can’t remember some or all of the things that happened after you started drinking, you’ve experienced a blackout.
Alcohol also affects a person’s ability to make memories but not in the same way that it affects other cognitive functions. Be prepared to give medical professionals any information you know about the person who needs help. Try to figure out what they’ve been drinking and how much they’ve consumed. You may be worried about getting them in trouble, but any information you share can be life-saving, so don’t omit any details that could help emergency responders provide care. It is not difficult to navigate through an evening with full awareness of your life before the blackout began and of only what happened in the last three minutes since the blackout began. The gap in memory between the beginning of amnesia and the last three minutes continues to grow as long as the blackout lasts.
Preventing an Alcohol Blackout
Combining alcohol with substances like benzodiazepines and opioids can also increase blackout risks. A blackout is not the same as “passing out,” which means either falling asleep or losing consciousness from drinking too much. People report driving cars, having unprotected sex, vandalizing property, getting into fights and abusing illicit drugs when blacked out. American Addiction Centers (AAC) is committed to delivering original, truthful, accurate, unbiased, and medically current information. We strive to create content that is clear, concise, and easy to understand. Throughout college and into my 20s, I clung to the belief that women who drank were cool.
Effects of Alcohol on Memory
As the dose increases, so does the magnitude of the memory impairments. Under certain circumstances, alcohol can disrupt or completely block the ability to form memories for events that transpire while a person is intoxicated, a type of impairment known as a blackout. This article reviews what is currently known regarding the specific features of acute alcohol-induced memory dysfunction, particularly alcohol-induced blackouts, and the pharmacological mechanisms underlying them. As fun substance abuse group activities for adults mentioned above, damage limited to the CA1 region of the hippocampus dramatically disrupts the ability to form new explicit memories (Zola-Morgan et al. 1986). In rodents, the actions of CA1 pyramidal cells have striking behavioral correlates.
Alcohol-Related Blackouts
When doses of alcohol are small to moderate (producing blood alcohol concentrations [BACs] below 0.15 percent), memory impairments tend to be small to moderate as well. Several studies have revealed that alcohol at such levels causes difficulty forming memories for items on word lists or learning to recognize new faces (Westrick et al. 1988; Mintzer and Griffiths 2002). As the dose increases, the resulting memory impairments can become much more profound, sometimes culminating in blackouts—periods for which a person is unable to remember critical elements of events, or even entire gift to celebrate sobriety events, that occurred while he or she was intoxicated. In support of this possibility, a recent study by Hartzler and Fromme (2003a) suggests that people with a history of blackouts are more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol on memory than those without a history of blackouts.
- The test is free and confidential, and no personal information is needed to receive the results.
- Jellinek’s initial characterization of blackouts was based on data collected from a survey of Alcoholics Anonymous members.
- If you see warning signs for alcohol poisoning or overdose — such as vomiting, difficulty breathing, or cold or blue skin — then get emergency medical help immediately.
- He is the author of numerous books, including From Bud to Brain and Marijuana on My Mind.
- Blackouts may not cause direct harm, but the amount of drinking you have to do to become blackout drunk has serious consequences — especially over time.
- Studies also suggest that prenatal exposure to alcohol increases a person’s chance of experiencing blackouts in the future, and certain genes may increase a person’s likelihood to black out.
The dose-dependent suppression of CA1 pyramidal cells is consistent with the dose-dependent effects of alcohol on episodic memory formation. Women who consume four or more drinks, or men who consume five or more drinks, within about two hours are binge drinking.[6] This practice raises BAC dramatically and can increase the risk of serious consequences, including memory loss. A person is more likely to experience an alcohol-related blackout when their BAC is 0.16% or higher. Blackouts happen when you drink so much alcohol that your brain isn’t able to store memories long-term. The most common is a fragmentary blackout, which leads to only partial memories being formed, with missing periods of time.
Questions about blackouts during routine medical visits could serve as an important simple screen for the risk of alcohol-related harms. If you’re unable to control how much you drink, avoid drinking altogether. If you have experienced a blackout before, you’re likely at a higher risk for blacking out in the future and should exercise caution. If you’re having difficulty concentrating, remembering recent events or keeping track of a conversation, you may be close to getting blackout drunk. If you’re in that situation, find someone you trust and find a safe ride home.
Formal research into the nature of alcohol-induced blackouts began in the 1940s with the work of E.M. Jellinek’s initial characterization of blackouts was based on data collected from a survey of Alcoholics Anonymous members. Noting that recovering alcoholics frequently reported having experienced alcohol-induced amnesia while they were drinking, Jellinek concluded that the occurrence of blackouts is a powerful indicator of alcoholism. Despite advances in human neuroimaging techniques, animal models remain absolutely essential in the study of mechanisms underlying alcohol-induced memory impairments. Hopefully, future work will reveal more regarding the ways in which the effects of alcohol on multiple transmitter systems interact to disrupt memory formation. As might be expected given the excessive drinking habits of many college students (Wechsler et al. 2002), this population commonly experiences blackouts.
A blackout from drinking is far different from passing out, although people tend to confuse the two. A person who is blackout drunk is still conscious and making decisions. They may even appear to hold conversations, even if they experience memory loss when drinking. Binging, pre-partying, and alcohol games, especially on an empty stomach, all produce a rapid rise in blood alcohol levels that make blackouts more what foods have alcohol in them likely. 1It is well beyond the scope of this review to assess the impact of alcohol on memory utilizing multiple perspectives on information processing and storage. For simplicity, this review will characterize the effects of alcohol on memory using a three-stage process of memory formation akin to the modal model.
Some cells tend to discharge electrical signals that result in one cell communicating with other cells (i.e., action potentials) when the rodent is in a distinct location in its environment. Collectively, the cells that are active in that particular environment create a spatial, or contextual map that serves as a framework for event memories created in that environment. Because of the location-specific firing of these cells, they often are referred to as “place-cells,” and the regions of the environment in which they fire are referred to as “place-fields” (for reviews, see Best and White 1998; Best et al. 2001). Most of the research conducted on blackouts during the past 50 years has involved surveys, interviews, and direct observation of middle-aged, primarily male alcoholics, many of whom were hospitalized.
Binge drinking, which rapidly raises BAC, is what causes alcoholic blackouts. A high BAC makes it difficult for the brain to form new memories, leading to long periods of time in which someone is drinking and not remembering what they are doing or what is happening around them. Few cognitive functions or behaviors escape the impact of alcohol, a fact that has long been recognized in the literature. As Fleming stated nearly 70 years ago, “the striking and inescapable impression one gets from a review of acute alcoholic intoxication is of the almost infinite diversity of symptoms that may ensue from the action of this single toxic agent” (1935) (pp. 94–95). In addition to impairing balance, motor coordination, decisionmaking, and a litany of other functions, alcohol produces detectable memory impairments beginning after just one or two drinks.
Indeed, based on interviews with 136 heavy-drinking young adults (mean age 22), Hartzler and Fromme (2003b) concluded that en bloc blackouts often arise from the combined use of alcohol and other drugs. White and colleagues (2004) observed that, among 50 undergraduate students with a history of blackouts, only 3 students reported using other drugs during the night of their most recent blackout, and marijuana was the drug in each case. During the 2 weeks preceding the survey, an equal percentage of males and females experienced blackouts, despite the fact that males drank significantly more often and more heavily than females. This outcome suggests that at any given level of alcohol consumption, females—a group infrequently studied in the literature on blackouts—are at greater risk than males for experiencing blackouts. The greater tendency of females to black out likely arises, in part, from well-known gender differences in physiological factors that affect alcohol distribution and metabolism, such as body weight, proportion of body fat, and levels of key enzymes. There also is some evidence that females are more susceptible than males to milder forms of alcohol-induced memory impairments, even when given comparable doses of alcohol (Mumenthaler et al. 1999).