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If you are a heavy drinker than you might have experienced a complete temporary loss of memory after a heavy booze. You simply would not remember periods of time after the drink. This is because alcohol messes up with the nervous system which in turn disrupts your ability to form memories. Black out is a common phenomenon among heavy drinkers also it has found to be existent among social drinkers and college drinkers. People also normally tend to misinterpret passing out after drinks as blackouts. However there is a marked difference between blackouts and passing outs. Normally blackouts do not involve a loss of consciousness and individuals can involve themselves in a wide range of goal-directed, specific and often complicated behaviors during blackouts but the problem is that they do not seem to remember them after wards. However during a pass out it’s a total loss of consciousness.
Alcohol is very harmful to the human brain affecting every function of the nervous system impairing motor coordination and decision making in the process. This has completely been stated in those immortal words of Fleming "The striking and inescapable impression one gets from a review of acute alcoholic intoxication is of the almost infinite diversity of symptoms that may ensue from the action of this single toxic agent.” it is the harmful affects of alcohols on the brain that causes this kind of blackouts.
Before understanding the causes of blackouts due to alcohol we have to understand what
Is the procedure of memory storage in the human brain? Our human brain has two parts of memory short term memory and long-term. Once an event has occurred it is stored in the short term memory for a few moments and it is then shifted onto the long term memory. However whether it is shifted into the long term memory depends on a number of underlying factors such as repetition of memory and focus. So when we drink large quantities of alcohol we tend to have memory lapses. This is because alcohol has several memory inhibiting components which resist the transfer of memory from short term to long term. So a person after a heavy dose of alcohol might remember things immediately but if you ask them similar things after a long interval of time it becomes difficult for them to retain. However people normally are capable of retrieving information placed in long-term storage prior to acute intoxication.
The level of memory impairment is a very relative thing and cannot be properly ascertained as to the what exact amount of impairment occurred and what amount of alcohol causes what level of impairment’s Mello (1973) stated three decades ago with regard to the human memory in common "The inconsistent use of descriptive terms has been a recurrent source of confusion in the ´short-term´ memory literature and ´short-term´ memory has been variously defined as 5 seconds, 5 minutes, and 30 minutes".
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