…and how does blacking out actually work? Do people actually go unconscious? Or do they just not remember?
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Alcohol has a whole range of effects on the body and the brain, which get worse as the dosage increases. One of those effects, when you’re fairly drunk, is that your brain stops creating long-term memories. Short term memory still works fine, so people who have a blackout still seem somewhat normal at the time (although very obviously drunk), but when they wake up the next day they simply have no memories at all from the blackout period, because the long term memories were never created during that time.
Now people CAN go unconscious from alcohol poisoning, but that is at even higher levels of alcohol intoxication.
Its sort of like your brain has to work so much harder just to do simple things, like keep you alive, it drops some of its other duties to focus. One of those things is making memories, so its not that you forget things, it’s that you never remembered them in the first place.
You don’t exactly have no memory, your brain just stops storing them at a certain point — so you’re aware of what you’re doing during a so-called “blackout,” your brain just stops recording.
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