Last Friday Night

                Welcome to college. Here you will gain a lot of knowledge, make some amazing connections, meet some wonderful people, and learn from some phenomenal professors. Here you will begin the rest of your life. Here, you might forget what happened last Friday night.

                So you’ve just turned 21 and it’s time to go bar-hopping with your closest friends. From the first beer to the fourth tequila shot to that fruity margarita, you’re having a great time…and gradually losing some of your basic capabilities. Alcohol impairs your ability to form new long-term memories; the more alcohol you intake, the greater the impairment. However, alcohol does not impact your previously established long-term memories (you’ll still remember things from earlier that day, the day before, etc.) nor does it impact your short-term memory (you still have 15-30 seconds of remembering new information). However, these 15-30 seconds don’t get you very far.

                So back to your 21^st birthday; you are drinking a lot of alcohol and likely very quickly. This is what results in partial or complete blackout. Come tomorrow morning, there will be a lot of events that you don’t remember from your birthday.

                Why does this happen?

Work done by Aaron White, supported by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism looked into just that. Alcohol disrupts activity in the hippocampus thus impairing our ability to form new autobiographical memories. This can lead us to forget things from meeting people, having conversations, or worse, and far more common with college students, having intercourse. When the impairment is so strong that these things are forgotten and these memories cannot be formed, you are blacking out. Alcohol begins producing detectable memory impairments after just one or two drinks. That is all it takes to begin losing those capabilities (not to mention coordination, balance, decision-making, and other cognitive impairments, etc.).

Blackouts act similar to amnesia. Events, no matter how strong the physical or emotional attachment, are easily forgotten. My first year roommate, for example, could come home and punch the wall crying and then wake up wondering where the cuts on her hand came from. My friend from Worcester fell off the sidewalk and spent an entire week wondering why her arm hurt so much before someone told her that she fell and landed on it and refused to continue walking until multiple people promised it wasn’t broken. And multiple men and women I have met since coming to college have been informed by outside sources of their intimate activity, which they were incapable of recalling.

Robert Nash and Melanie Takarangi surveyed 280 college students and not only did they experience blackouts, but they also tried so hard to fill in the blanks that they were prone to creating false memories. According to this study, men are more likely to experience a blackout than women, however both groups were prone to creating false memories.

So with all of this information and all of these risks, why is blacking out such a common occurrence? Well, binge drinking is commonly portrayed on television and in the media. “Jersey Shore” is a great example of this. This television show advertised binge drinking every single week. These “television stars” went out to clubs and participated in binge drinking and oftentimes woke up and asked each other what happened the night before. Another “great” example is portrayed in all three renditions of “The Hangover.” This group of friends is forced to retrace their footsteps every movie because they have totally blacked out and are unaware of what happened the previous night (and usually there is a person missing – so it’s kind of urgent). However, they are incapable of truly retracing their footsteps because their memories were so greatly impaired. They must rely on the recollections of people they ran into along the way in order to find the next person and location. This exposure leads people to become less concerned about this behavior and college kids tend to “brush it off” and “move onto the next.”

Now that you have this knowledge, I hope you have a great time Friday night (and remember it all Saturday morning)!

Also, if you'd like some more media coverage, please enjoy this lovely song.

Blackouts and the Brain: http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-2/186-196.htm

Survey of college students / false memories: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2011/11/did-i-do-that-psychology-of-alcohol.html