I know the effect from my former me and many of you might have experienced it, too. When drinking a lot of alcohol one tends to forget minutes to hours of what happened. Why does this happen? Are the cells storing the info dying? Is there a problem with passing the info down to the cells that store them? Are we just tired late at night and this is the reason why we cannot remember? Please help me to understand.
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I’m not sure of the actual specifics, but I do know that it’s not a case of forgetting, but rather that your brain shuts off the part that actually makes the memories in the first place
Alcohol inhibits your brains ability to create *long term memories*, hence why you will still remember a few minutes ago, but when you go to sleep and your brain tries to form those crystallized memories it won’t be able to
The more you drink the more difficult it will become for your brain or the more segmented the memories will be
A symptom of severe alcoholism is large lapses of memories over time, even when you are sober, because your brain needs to create those long term memories to function optimally
I don’t know the details, but you don’t actually forget, your brain didn’t save memories to begging with! After certain percentage of alcohol in your blood, the mechanisms for making long term memory just don’t work any more.
Now the scary thing is that the same percentage of blood alcohol influences people differently, depending on your alcohol resistance.
One person could be a wet rag that can’t stand up and can’t create a coherent sentence.
Another person could be visibly drunk, but perfectly capable of holding a conversation and doing physical tasks.
Both wont remember half the night
It isn’t so much as they lose memories, but that they can’t actually form memories, so next day they might not remember what they did because it wasn’t put into their basket of long term memories. https://youtu.be/UfDdfRZmy1E
You have several types of memory:
* Iconic memory, which handles the very now. The impulse, what happened an eyeblink ago.
* Working memory, which handles stuff you need to keep in your brain to function. What’s said in a conversation, math problems, what happened 30 seconds ago on that soap opera you’re watching.
* Long-term memory, anything further back than that.
Well. The long-term memory creation is handled by the part of the brain called the hippocampus and it needs several neurotransmitters to do that job. Alcohol is a GABA inhibitor (GABA is one of those neurotransmitters), so memories are fuzzy at best and non-existant at worst.
In short, trying to create memories while drunk is like trying to print out that funny image you found, but all the toner cartridges are on their last leg.
This is also why pretty much anything that interferes with the function of GABA can cause memory loss and blackouts (for example benzos and many date-rape drugs like GHB). In the case of fast acting ones they act so fast (within 10 minutes or so) that they can prevent your brain from creating the memory of taking the drug in the first place.
When I was a drinker, my memory used to fade more in the days I drank more or did some shitty behavior. I think there is a cognitive component also related to the issue.
Because when you sleep it prevents you from getting deep sleep which is when our brain recalls events from the day and catalogues them.
The hippocampus shuts down after enough alcohol and they quit making memories. That don’t forget anything
Alcohol has many effects in the brain so it’s hard to pin down a mechanism. But it blocks one called glutamate in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is involved in making new memories so when that’s out of commission, new memories are temporarily not made. Older established memories are unaffected. So that’s the memory blackout period.
Alcohol affects the brain and how it processes information. It disrupts the formation of memories, making it hard to remember things that happened when you were drunk. It doesn’t necessarily kill cells, but it interferes with the brain’s ability to store and retrieve information, because its sedative effects and impact on brain functions.
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