What is really happening when someone gets drunk to the point of having a “blackout”? Experiences from the 1970s tested the boundaries of ethics to realize how alcohol erases memory.
According to several studies, a large percentage of people (66%, in a student) has already experienced the experience of being “drunk to the point of having a blackout” – that is, losing part of the memory After consuming alcohol.
However, until relatively short time, this was a phenomenon on which We knew surprisingly little.
One of the problems in studying this theme (with humans, not animal models) is that it would be I need people in a state of deceitThe voluntary entry into the laboratory, or trust what they remembered these episodes in which, precisely, they were not forming memories.
However, in the past, there was a third way – little ethicsNote O: Give alcohol to alcoholics and perform tests as they crossed these blackout states.
That’s exactly what happened in the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when the investigator Donald Goodwin He recruited hospitalized alcoholics to participate in a series of unusual memory tests.
In the first part of the study, participants were asked about their own blackout experiences and how others described their behavior during these episodes.
Perhaps amazinglyGoodwin found that people looked like, in most cases, maintain some control over their faculties during these periods.
“The most dramatic blackouts involved ViagenS ”wrote Goodwin in what he did in 1069, published in 2018 in British Journal of Psychiatry.
“About 1/4 of the participants, while they drank, they were at least once given by you in a place without any memory how they had arrived there. Often this involved long trips over a day or more. To travel such distances, the person Obviously had to maintain some control About your abilities, ”says Goodwin.
“In some cases, people Checks passed, boarded on aircraftThey checked hotels-but they could not consciously remember any of these events, ”he adds.
Friends who saw them in these states described us as drunkbut to behave relatively normal.
Talk to these patients revealed intriguing information About the blackouts – for example, You can be aware that you are in a blackout while being awake. One of the participants gave himself to dance, without any remembrance of what he had done in the previous six hours.
In a particularly striking episode, A 39 -year -old salesman woke up to “strange hotel room“. It was shaved, and the clothes were carefully hung in the closet. When addressing the reception, the employee informed him that I had checked in two days before.
The point where these experiences surpassed the ethics line that today it would hardly be accepted was when Goodwin gave alcohol directly to the participants.
Goodwin gathered volunteers – some with history of blackouts, others without -And gave them to drink until half liter of whiskey over four hours.
During that time, evaluated your remote memory, immediate memory (ability to remember events for a minute), short -term memory (30 minutes) and recent memory (events immediately prior to the consumer period).
During the experience, the volunteers They saw a series of porn movies. The inability to recognize these stimuli the next day served to determine if they had had a blackout.
Goodwin could directly observe how participants got behave apparently normal even during the blackout.
In another test, he held a skillet in his hand and asked participants if they were hungry. After responding, I informed them that the frying pan was Full of dead rats.
Curiously, Participants forgot this episode 30 minutes and did not remember the next daybut they could recall it about two minutes after it happened-suggesting that short-term memory remained active during the blackouts.
These experiences of dubious ethics have given information about what may be happening during drunken blackouts, which was corroborated by other animal models experiences.
The best idea we have right now is that The drink harms the hippocampusa region of the brain with an important role in learning and memory.
The problem seems to be no failure to remember memories that are there, but inaccessible, but The failure to create these long -term memories in the first place.
“We believe that much of what is happening is due to the fact that alcohol is suppressing the hippocampus, making it impossible to create this continuous registration of events,” he said in 2018 Aaron Whitefrom the National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism of the USA, to. “It’s like a temporary gap on the tape.”
