Alcohol tolerance can vary, so there’s no exact number of shots that can cause an alcohol blackout. Blackouts are caused less by how much you drink and how quickly you drink alcohol, especially when you have a rapid increase in BAC that exceeds 0.16%. If you notice signs of rapid intoxication, such as slurred speech, poor coordination or blurry vision, you may be overconsuming alcohol. These signs may mean you’re approaching a BAC where blackouts may occur.

How To Avoid Alcohol Blackouts

These are the frontal lobe, the reasoning area of the brain that we use when we’re paying attention to something, and the amygdala, the area that warns us about danger. Though these experiments were performed with alcoholics, they set the stage for understanding how even non-alcoholics act during a blackout. They remain influential in part because today – for obvious ethical reasons – scientists cannot ply participants with alcohol to induce memory loss. They must largely rely largely on questionnaires of past events instead. Binge drinking increases the risk of alcohol poisoning, which can cause death.

1. A blackout is a complete (en bloc) period of amnesia in which the brain does not form new long-term memories.
2. Alcohol misuse treatment programs teach people how to move into an alcohol-free lifestyle while teaching them healthy coping strategies.
3. It’s almost impossible to realize you’re blacking out while it’s happening.
4. Like the risk factors, the consequences of blacking out are not only worse for adolescents, but also for women.

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It’s thought that chronic alcohol consumption can harm the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe also plays a role in short-term and long-term memory formation and recall. The memory gap that blackout drinking causes isn’t necessarily dangerous alone.

If you experience a partial blackout, visual or verbal cues may help you remember forgotten events. A blackout is not the same as “passing out,” which means either falling asleep or losing consciousness from drinking too much. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Understanding these definitions and the difference between blackouts and passing out is incredibly important, as it may be difficult for other people to recognize someone is having a blackout because of their seemingly aware state.

Memory deficits during ablackout are primarily anterograde, meaning memory loss for events that occurredafter alcohol consumption (White, 2003). There is noobjective evidence that a person is in an alcohol-induced blackout (Pressman and Caudill, Understanding Different Types of Psychedelic Mushrooms 2013), thus it can be difficult orimpossible to know whether or not a drinker is experiencing a blackout (Goodwin, 1995). This is similar to the factthat one cannot know whether another person has a headache; the experience ishappening inside that person’s brain, with no clear observable indices. Perhaps the greatest impediment to rigorous tests of alcohol-inducedblackouts and behavior is that researchers are not ethically permitted toprovide alcohol in sufficient doses to cause a blackout to occur.

Both types of blackouts stem from alcohol’s impact on the hippocampus, the region of the brain responsible for memory consolidation. During a blackout, alcohol hinders the hippocampus’s ability to transfer memories from short-term to long-term storage, resulting in gaps or total absence of memories. Fragmentary blackouts typically preserve short-term memory functioning and some episodic memories. In contrast, en bloc blackouts present a more extensive disruption, sparing neither short-term nor episodic recall for the duration of the blackout. Alcohol is a part of life for many people, helping them relax, socialize and party. Excessive alcohol use can, however, lead to problems like alcohol blackouts.

Adolescents and Students

Identifying an alcohol blackout can be difficult because you may still engage in normal behaviors like driving a car, spending money, talking to others, or having sex. You just won’t remember what you did the next day because your memories have not formed or been transferred to long-term memory storage. Research shows alcohol can begin affecting a person’s brain afteronly oneortwo drinks.

Using longitudinal methods, Schuckit andcolleagues (2015) and Wilhite andFromme (2015) focused specifically on prospective analyses ofalcohol-induced blackouts. Schuckit andcolleagues (2015) used latent class growth analysis to evaluate thepattern of occurrence of alcohol-induced blackouts across 4 time points in 1,402drinking adolescents between the ages of 15–19. Surprisingly,30% of the adolescents reported experiencing an alcohol-induced blackoutat the age of 15, which increased to 74% at age 19. Although alcohol-induced blackouts were previously thought to occur only inindividuals who were alcohol dependent (Jellinek,1946), we now know that blackouts are quite common among healthy youngadults. In fact, approximately 50% of college students who consume alcoholreport having experienced an alcohol-induced blackout (Barnett et al., 2014; White et al., 2002). Therefore, this systematic review provides an update(2010–2015) on the clinical research focused on alcohol-induced blackouts,outlines practical and clinical implications, and provides recommendations forfuture research.