Depending on how much the person drinks, it's possible to transition from having a blackout to passing out. During a blackout, the drinker is still awake, but their brain isn’t creating new memories. It’s as if the events never happened in the mind of the person who went through the experience, even if they are prompted to remember things later by people who were with them at the time.Ī blackout event is not the same as “passing out," which means either someone falls asleep or loses consciousness from drinking too much. This severe form of blacking out involves a lack of memory formation that typically is never recoverable. If a drinker experiences complete amnesia, often spanning hours of time, it’s called an “en bloc” blackout.
This type is commonly called a “grayout” or a “brownout.” A “fragmentary blackout” is the most common type and is characterized by spotty memories of events, including “islands” of memories that are separated by periods of time in between when the drinker can’t remember any details of their experience. Two types of blackouts can occur, depending on the severity of memory impairment. So, what exactly constitutes a blackout?Īs the NIAAA webpage explains, a blackout happens when a person drinks enough alcohol to “temporarily block the transfer of memories from short-term to long-term storage -known as memory consolidation - in a brain area called the hippocampus.” In this way, a blackout is a lasting gap in someone’s memory for events that happened while they were intoxicated. It doesn’t matter a person’s age or level of experience with drinking - anyone who drinks alcohol can suffer a blackout event if the conditions are right. Alcohol-induced blackouts can lead to memory impairment of events that happen while someone is intoxicated, and they drastically increase the drinker’s risk of injuries and other types of harm. When it comes to college kids and alcohol, blackout drinking is something we parents need to learn about and discuss with our students.Īccording to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), drinking to the point of blacking out has gained pop culture notoriety in recent years. It’s a phrase you’ve likely heard before - someone “getting blackout drunk.”īut what does that actually mean and why is it so dangerous?
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