8/31/2023 0 Comments Getting wasted meme![]() In another, with a frying pan in hand, he asked individuals if they were hungry. In one he showed participants pornography, then asked detailed questions about what they had seen. In follow-up experiments, he plied alcoholics with whiskey (up to 18oz – or half a litre – in four hours) and presented them with situations that were set up to “provide memorable experiences, which sober persons have no difficulty remembering”. But 30 minutes later, these events were forgotten. For instance, he showed that during intoxication subjects revealed “no impairment” of immediate memory and even were able to perform simple calculations. He also revealed that individuals experiencing a blackout can act in a remarkably coherent manner. He found that out of 100 alcoholics, more than 60 experienced regular blackouts, some total and some fragmentary. If this type of amnesia after drinking alcohol sounds familiar, that’s because blackouts are surprisingly common: one analysis suggests that over half of university-aged drinkers have experienced some level of blackout when asked about their drinking habits, while a survey of more than 2,000 adolescents recently out of secondary school found that 20% had experienced a blackout in the previous six months. It was only looking back that she realised she had a “messed up” relationship with alcohol, experiences she has written about in a book. Hepola’s regular blackouts didn’t ring alarm bells for her at the time. Some drinkers experience less severe, fragmentary blackouts where only pieces of memory are lost. As the word suggests, in this state all memories of the night turn dark after a point. She was experiencing alcohol-fuelled blackouts – a colloquial term with potentially serious consequences. It often felt like “a trap door had opened underneath me… I would wake up the next day and I would be in a different place,” she says. This sort of memory loss happened time and again to Hepola – and from a very early age. ![]() “I was like, well that’s weird, I don’t know what happened… I just kind of laughed it off, it just seemed normal to me,” she recalls. How did she get there, where was the stamp on her hand from? Who bought the pizza? Who was the man beside her? She remembers talking to people at a party, but then after that a shadow drops over her memories. ![]() Much of her memory from the previous night was blank. It was another regrettably familiar wake-up for Sarah Hepola. This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2018” collection.
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