what happens when we blackout from drinking too much?
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There’s a physical part of your brain that handles moving things from short term memory into long term memory.
Get sufficiently shitfaced and that part of the brain, like all the others, can stop functioning correctly. That blocks the ability to form coherent long term memories, and so you don’t remember anything the next morning.
You’re also impairing the ability to see or balance or think clearly, so it’s not surprising that all the other background brain processes start to break down too.
Broadly speaking, Alcohol’s mechanism of action works by facilitating the action of a “calming”, activity reducing neurotransmitter called GABA. GABA generally reduces of the amount of electrical activity in a particular neuron/neural pathway, or even generalized region of the brain.
As you become more intoxicated with alcohol, GABA activity increasingly shuts down neural activity in your brain. This happens in stages. You loose your inhibitions of your thoughts and words, you begin to loose tight control of your muscles (i.e. you slip and stagger, knock things over). Memory loss happens when there is a high blood alcohol content, enough that the neurological processes that encode memory in the relevant brain structures are interrupted, and thus you don’t remember.
The molecules that comprise the part of booze that makes you drunk are the right shape to block neurotransmission, the things in your brain that let it “talk” to itself, other parts of the brain, and the rest of your body. As you get drunk, more and more parts of your brain can’t communicate. This affects, among many other things, coordination, memory formation, and your “social filter.” Your eyes can see something, and try to remember it, but the signals that would normally tell your brain to store something in memory are either muddled or blocked entirely (brown and blackouts).
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