ANATOMY OF A Blackout. Why Are We Not Talking About The Campus Culture of Blackout Drunk?
In the war against campus sexual assault, why are we not talking about drinking? College presidents have long considered alcohol to be one of the biggest problems they face on campus. Alcohol is also involved in a great number of campus sexual assault cases. We find ourselves in a landscape where the key talking points address everything but alcohol. How we raise young boys. How accusers are treated in the media, courts, and interrogation rooms…In October 2013, when Slate contributor Emily Yoffe wrote an essay suggesting that women would lower their chances of being sexually assaulted if they drank less, the blowback was massive. A month later, Southern Methodist University student Kirby Wiley received a similar lashing when she wrote an op-ed for the college paper saying that women put themselves at risk by drinking too much. Epidemiologist Richard Grucza has tied the rise of women drinking with the rise of women in college—across Western democracies, the more affluent and educated a female, the more likely she is to drink. And yet. High-profile assault cases keep unfolding in the media, many of them under a foggy haze of booze.
…A blackout can mean the total erasure of an entire chunk of time from a person’s memory, an occurrence known as an en bloc blackout. Or they might just forget bits and pieces, in a fragmentary blackout, or a brownout, as some call it. These are more common. Even during a blackout, a drinker’s short-term memory is generally fine. She can carry on a conversation, though, like a human goldfish, she may quickly forget things and repeat herself. It’s episodic memory where alcohol gums up the works. These are the memories of events—what happened, but also where, when, and with whom. Alcohol impairs the encoding of these contextual memories, which happens in the hippocampus. “Your brain is sending information to the hippocampus, and it falls into a void, the hippocampus doesn’t tie it together, or it skips a little bit.”
How quickly one’s blood alcohol content rises is the biggest risk factor for a blackout. That means things that make you drunker faster—drinking liquor or drinking on an empty stomach—make you more likely to black out. You’re also more likely to black out if you’re a woman.
theatlantic-Antamony of Blackout texasmonthly-The Alcohol Blackout
