after one night intense partya phrase that can become common is “yesterday I drank so much that I have blackouts.” For years, popular culture has treated these episodes as the fact that alcohol is a kind of eraser of memories in our brain, but the reality is very different: It’s not that memories are erased, it’s that they never existed..
The notice. Our parents didn’t say it anymore: drinking a lot of alcohol and smoking controversial substances is something that can fry the brain. And they were partly right. different experts point out in connection with research and meta-analysis on alcohol consumption and brain health, which shed light on what exactly happens in our heads when we go too far.
A blackout. What we usually call a ‘gap’, memory loss the morning after a drunken night, is technically anterograde amnesia, or blackout. During a blackout a person can continue talking, walking (not always straight) and even having apparently normal conversations, but your brain has stopped transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory.
The person responsible for all this It is in the hippocampus itselfa region of the brain that acts as the logistics center for our memories. They arrive here to be stored in long-term memory, which is what interests us to remember what we did the next morning.
A chemical interference. When the blood alcohol concentration begins to rise rapidly, quite significant chemical interference occurs. In this case modulates NMDA and GABA receptors which alters the communication between neurons and interrupts the ‘Long-term empowerment‘ (LTP). The latter is the physical process by which neural connections are strengthened to consolidate a memory.
In short: during a heavy drunk, the hippocampus is still on to store memories, but the ‘save button’ is completely switched off. Therefore, the next day no matter how hard we try: there is nothing to recover because nothing was recorded in the hippocampus.
They fry the brain. If we recover the idea that our grandmothers and parents transmitted to us about the effect of alcohol on the brain, the reality is that neuroimaging studies show As in chronic users there is significant hippocampal atrophy. This does not mean that memories become like water, but rather that the volume of brain matter is decreased.
As brain tissue shrinks due to neuronal and connectivity loss, the empty space is occupied by cerebrospinal fluid. And this can give us the myth that the memory turns into water or black spots appear on the imaging tests when they pass.
The effect on young people. In this population it has traditionally been said that they can handle alcohol much better and with several drinks they continue to be in top shape. But scientifically a great paradox occurs: the adolescent and young brain is extremely plastic, which makes it much more vulnerable to external aggressions.
This is why binge drinking in developing brains not only causes blackouts more easily, but can also generate persistent changes in brain structure. Science has shown in this case that even moderate consumption (more than 14 units per week) is linked to greater hippocampal atrophy and worse long-term cognitive performance.
He doesn’t forget who he is. Excessive alcohol does not cause us to suddenly forget our names, something that would fall squarely into the realm of serious dementia. But what is clear is that the blackouts repeated are an obvious risk marker. Not only because of silent structural damage, but because of behavioral vulnerability: a person who is not creating memories is a person who has lost the ability to learn from the consequences of their actions in real time, drastically increasing the risk of accidents and dangerous decisions.
Images | Nate Holland Alyona Yankovska
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