Blacked out: a night not remembered
After a night of drinking with two friends, Jessica Verchota woke up to find her apartment trashed: shattered glass, broken picture frames, books scattered around the room and small puddles of wine soaked the floor.
No one remembers how this mess came to be because all three of them blacked out.
“I’ve never intended to blackout,” Verchota said. “I don’t like knowing that I’m completely awake for hours and I have no control over myself and I’m not processing anything around me.”
Students who drink, like Verchota, a junior screenwriting and sociology major, may experience blackouts, or alcohol-induced amnesia, after having too much to drink. Consuming too much alcohol affects the entire body, especially the brain’s ability to process information.
Blackouts typically start occurring at a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.14-0.17, according to the Student Health Services at the University of California, San Diego. The legal BAC in California is 0.08.
Verchota said she also blacked out while studying abroad in New Zealand last spring. She was on a camping trip with a group of friends and they decided to play drinking games.
“I woke up freezing cold in my tent just wrapped up in my coat, not even a sleeping bag or blanket, and I had one glove off,” Verchota said. “I just shivered my way through the rest of the night and when everyone got up, I found my glove outside.”
Verchota’s friends then recapped the night for her.
“I was so obnoxious, I had run around and apparently I was so drunk that I tripped on someone’s tent when they were in there sleeping and I fell on them through the outside of the tent,” Verchota said.
Blacking out occurs at a blood alcohol content of 0.14–0.17 percent, 0.06-0.09 percent more than the legal level in California.
Graphic by Lauren Armenta, Art Director.
Alcohol interferes with receptors in the brain and prevents some of them from working and activates others, according to gizmodo.com. This process creates steroids that prevent neurons from communicating, resulting in a disruption of the process used to learn or produce memories. This causes the drinker to blackout and not remember previous events.
There are two types of blackouts: fragmentary blackouts, when bits and pieces are forgotten, and en bloc, a complete loss of memory, according to Steven Schandler, a psychology professor at Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences.
“We’re dealing with a poison; something that’s destructive to both nerve and physical tissue,” Schandler said. “We can assume that it’s causing some level of destruction in the area where we most associate long term memory.”
Blackouts used to be strictly associated with alcoholics, but more recent research is showing that blackouts occur quite frequently on college campuses, according to Dani Smith, director of health education and Proactive Education Encouraging Responsibility (PEER).
“In one study (by Duke University), students who had blacked out as a result of drinking alcohol found out from others that they had engaged in a number of risky activities including having unprotected sex, driving a car and vandalizing other’s property,” Smith wrote in an email.
Schandler said researchers are still trying to figure out exactly what causes blackouts and they’ve come up with two possible reasons.
“One reason they can’t remember could be because the alcohol is affecting the hippocampus and therefore information is coming in but is kept short and not being sent out for long-term storage,” Schandler said.
This could explain why intoxicated individuals can hold a conversation in the moment, but they won’t remember having that conversation in the morning.
“You can talk to them and they’ll remember what you said a minute or two ago but once they come out of alcohol, they can’t remember a thing because it never got put into their long-term memory,” Schandler said.
The other reason could be that information isn’t reaching the brain at all.
“This is often forgotten in blackout research that the person may not be getting the information,” Schandler said. “They’re not going to remember something that doesn’t get to that part of the brain.”
Researchers are also trying to uncover the difference between a fragmentary and an en bloc blackout.
“What causes one over the other depends on the person’s physical status, how fast the alcohol is taken in and what kind of alcohol is being consumed,” Schandler said.
There are many ways to prevent yourself from having blackouts, Smith said, starting with eating before you start drinking.
“Food in your stomach helps to slow the absorption of alcohol into your bloodstream, lowering your blood alcohol concentration, which will help reduce your chances of blacking out,” Smith wrote.
The speed at which one consumes alcohol can also affect the likelihood of having a blackout, Smith wrote.
“The faster you drink those shots, beers, drinks, the greater your chances are of feeling significant damaging health effects, like blacking out,” Smith wrote. “Taking your time and spacing out your drinks can reduce the dangerous side effects that drinking quickly can cause.”
There’s a much higher chance of inducing a blackout when drinking hard liquor, as opposed to spirits that are made with more natural substances, such as beer or wine, Schandler said.
Schandler also said students need to understand the dangers of mixing alcohol with other drugs, especially with benzodiazepines such as Valium.
“The two work together to increase the probability that there will be a reduction in memory,” Schandler said. “We’ve had people who actually become brain dead from combining benzodiazepines with high levels of alcohol.”
Women are more likely to have blackouts than men for physiological reasons, Schandler said.
“Women have a somewhat different cardiopulmonary system because they can support additional life,” Schandler said. “Women also carry more body fat and alcohol is taken in and stored in fat, so women are affected much more rapidly by lower doses of alcohol.”
Another factor to take into consideration is your level of tolerance.
“After drinking for 10 or 15 years, what might have produced a blackout when they first started drinking doesn’t affect them at all,” Schandler said.
Verchota said it’s important to take things slow when you’re first figuring out your limits with alcohol.
“Take it a little bit slower than you think you should because you’re going to have to test the waters a bit,” Verchota said. “Stop before you think you need to and just wait it out a little bit to see how you feel.”
Verchota also said you should have an agreement with your friends to stay together and not leave anyone behind.
“My friends and I freshman year definitely all had been left at parties and wouldn’t know where our friends had gone,” Verchota said. “That’s just a scary situation, and you don’t want to let someone that you can’t keep track of drunkenly run around.”
Researchers are still trying to fully understand blackouts, but it’s taking some time because they’re difficult to produce in a laboratory, Schandler said.
“You have no idea how little we know about blackouts,” Schandler said. “It’s very complicated and it’s not a consistent phenomenon but one thing is very certain, we know for a fact that they really do happen.”
If you’re concerned about a student’s behavior, whether you’re their peer, professor or parent, you can fill out a Student Concern Informational Report on the Chapman website. Administration will reach out to those students and work with them to create a plan to ensure both their success and safety.
How to prevent blackouts:
- Don’t drink on an empty stomach
- Drink lots of water
- Pace yourself
- Drink weaker drinks
- Don’t drink while sleep deprived
- Drink in a familiar environment
- Don’t mix alcohol with medication
- Avoid drinking games
Photo courtesy Pexels.
