how to react to the world around us. Are we being threatened? Should we be afraid? Alcohol turns the amygdala down a notch. The combination of those three effects is where myopia comes from. We don’t have the brainpower to handle more complex, long-term considerations. We’re distracted by the unexpected pleasure of the alcohol. Our neurological burglar alarm is turned off. We become altered versions of ourselves, beholden to the moment. Alcohol also finds its way to your cerebellum, at the very back of the brain, which is involved in balance and coordination. That’s why you start to stumble and stagger when intoxicated. These are the predictable effects of getting drunk.
But under certain very particular circumstances—especially if you drink a lot of alcohol very quickly—something else happens. Alcohol hits the hippocampus—small, sausage-like regions on each side of the brain that are responsible for forming memories about our lives. At a blood-alcohol level of roughly 0.08—the legal level of intoxication—the hippocampus starts to struggle. When you wake up the morning after a cocktail party and remember meeting someone but cannot for the life of you remember their name or the story they told you, that’s because the two shots of whiskey you drank in quick succession reached your hippocampus. Drink a little more and the gaps get larger—to the point where maybe you remember pieces of the evening but other details can be summoned only with the greatest difficulty.
Aaron White, at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington, DC, is one of the world’s leading experts on blackouts, and he says that there is no particular logic to which bits get remembered and which don’t. “Emotional salience doesn’t seem to have an impact on the likelihood that your hippocampus records something,” he says. “What that means is you might, as a female, go to a party and you might remember having a drink downstairs, but you don’t remember getting raped. But then you do remember getting in the taxi.” At the next level—roughly around a blood-alcohol level of 0.15—the hippocampus simply shuts down entirely.
“In the true, pure blackout,” White said, “there’s just nothing. Nothing to recall.”
In one of the earliest studies of blackouts, an alcohol researcher named Donald Goodwin gathered ten men from an unemployment line in St. Louis, gave them each the better part of a bottle of bourbon over a four-hour period, then had them perform a series of memory tests. Goodwin writes:
One such event was to show the person a frying pan with a lid on it, suggest that he might be hungry, take off the lid, and there in the pan are three dead mice. It can be said with confidence that sober individuals will remember this experience, probably for the rest of their lives.
But the bourbon drinkers? Nothing. Not thirty minutes later, and not the next morning. The three dead mice never got recorded at all.
In a blackout state—in that window of extreme drunkenness before their hippocampus comes back online—drunks are like ciphers, moving through the world without retaining anything.
Goodwin once began an essay on blackouts with the following story:
A thirty-nine-year-old salesman awoke in a strange hotel room. He had a mild hangover but otherwise felt normal. His clothes were hanging in the closet; he was clean-shaven. He dressed and went down to the lobby. He learned from the clerk that he was in Las Vegas and that he had checked in two days previously. It had been obvious that he had been drinking, the clerk said, but he had not seemed very drunk. The date was Saturday the 14th. His last recollection was of sitting in a St. Louis bar on Monday the 9th. He had been drinking all day and was drunk, but could remember everything perfectly until about 3 p.m., when “like a curtain dropping,” his memory went blank. It remained blank for approximately five days. Three years later, it was still blank. He was so frightened by the experience that he abstained from alcohol for two years.
The salesman had left the bar in St. Louis, gone to the airport, bought a plane ticket, flown to Las Vegas, found a hotel, checked in, hung up his suit, shaved, and apparently functioned perfectly well in the world, all while in blackout mode. That’s the way blackouts work. At or around the 0.15 mark, the hippocampus shuts down and memories stop forming, but it is entirely possible that the frontal lobes, cerebellum, and amygdala of that same drinker—at the same time—can continue to function more