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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Blacked OUT

Why you don't remember last night

Hopelessly dialing phone numbers to find a ride home, a bar hopper instead found herself sprawled across the Taco Bell floor after a minor slip, content and still absorbed in punching buttons on the phone. \nLaughing at the girl's obliviousness, her friend coaxed her to her feet and off the grimy, plastic tiles. The final stop of a long night spent bar crawling might have been memorable, but will it be remembered? \nProbably not. \nWhatever the highlights of a Saturday night, alcohol-induced blackouts and the memory loss the mind suffers as a result could lead to far more serious consequences than capping off the evening on the Taco Bell floor. \n"Anything you can do when you are drunk, you can do when you're drunk and in a blackout," said Aaron White, assistant research professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, who researches college drinking in a phone interview. \nNot to be confused with passing out, blacking out is the conscious state of amnesia where the brain temporarily closes its long-term memory bank, a possible effect of alcohol in sensitive, blackout-prone individuals. \n"It is as if someone forgot to push the brain's record button," White wrote on his Web site, www.duke.edu/~amwhite/index.html. \nA blackout in itself is not detrimental to the brain but suggests a level of alcohol intake that might harm the body and lead to reduced inhibitions and risky behaviors, White said. \n"Intoxication is the health problem," White said. "The consequence is blacking out." \nBlacking out occurs when a certain level of alcohol effectively shuts down the hippocampus, halting the transfer of information from the short-term memory, which is updated few every minutes, to the long-term memory, which files memories away into the brain's library of information. \nThe total effect of alcohol on the brain results in what White describes as a myopic state, or being short-sighted in terms of good decision-making and caring about the future consequences of one's actions. Inhibitions and urges become muddled when the amygdala and frontal lobe of the brain are suppressed by alcohol. \nCombined with a blackout, the possibility for harm is limitless, said Ruth Gassman, executive director of the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at IU.\nNot all people who drink a large amount of alcohol black out, and not everyone who blacks out drinks a large amount of alcohol, according to White's Web site. Susceptibility varies between individuals: Some people experience blackouts frequently, while others never experience memory loss.\n"Regardless of individual sensitivity, blackouts are more likely to occur when blood alcohol levels rise fast," White said. \nAlcohol gets into the system so quickly it catches the brain off guard, he said. \nGassman said it might not take more than a couple of beers for those with a low threshold for alcohol to suffer a blackout. \n"People must learn their own sensitivity and not feel like they have to keep up with everyone else's drinking," she said. \nIndependent from a person's alcohol threshold, alcohol is metabolized at a constant rate that cannot be sped up. Dispelling the coffee myth, Gassman said the only way to control the level of alcohol in the body is to control intake. \nThose who drink past their threshold might take more risks, be more impulsive and use poor judgment in actions and behaviors, she said. \nJunior Paige Anderson said students might not understand the consequences of a blackout. \n"Students probably fail to fully realize the dangerous consequences of being blacked out because they feel safe passing out in a hallway if it's their friend's home and they don't feel that sexual assault or anything else is a problem," she said in an e-mail.\nWhile this might apply to certain situations, White said alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug and estimates that sexual assault happens every weekend on campuses across the country, possibly hundreds of times. \nIt is impossible to tell when someone is in a blackout because their short-term memory is allowing them to consciously function. The influence of alcohol might result in an atypical decision, such as what appears to be sexual consent. Since no new long-term memories are made while blacked out, having no recollection of such an experience can be scary and dangerous. \nIt is difficult for researchers to measure the experiences of blackouts, such as sexual assault and driving while intoxicated. \n"By definition, you can't remember what happened," White said. "There is just no way of knowing." \nWhite said he focuses on educating students on how to take care of themselves and what is acceptable behavior when drinking. \n"The culture around alcohol is the problem," he said. \nDrinking habits that are socially acceptable but dangerous can increase the likelihood of negative consequences, Anderson said. He said people who support heavy drinking behavior want to support a lifestyle image of being a serious partier -- a stigma associated with blacking out.\n"This stigma promotes behavior that is dangerous and also downplays its real consequences," she said. \nGassman said advertising and marketing images also feed into what is considered normal behavior, leading to more rationalization of harmful behaviors. \n"Being that unaware is a very dangerous place to be," she said of blacked out victims. \nWhite said people need to be held accountable for their behavior, even when drinking.\n"If you treat people the same way drunk as you do sober, then these problems would go away," White said.

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