What really happens in the brain when drinking turns into blackout – and why memory loss is not the harmless side effect many assume.
José Manuel Felices, doctor: “When you drink alcohol you lose the ability to create new memories”
There are those who feel that if a drink is not alcoholic, the toast somehow lacks magic; that alcohol adds sensation to the glass and that drinking lifts the spirit. The holiday season helps feed the myth. But the reader should know that, in the search for absolute pleasure, they may drown their awareness under disco lights – or fail to remember which guitar song they thrashed while trying to let their feet run free. Alcohol, though deeply embedded in parties and celebrations, is a ruthless destroyer of memory.
That reality has been highlighted by José Manuel Felices Farias, a radiology doctor who describes himself as a specialist in “making the difficult easy” and who also works as a science communicator. As he explains, alcohol consumption directly affects the hippocampus – “the area responsible for memory and learning” – impairing the formation of memories. It is no coincidence that the old advice says those who drink to forget should pay before they start.
“It makes you forget who you are”
“When you drink alcohol, the receptors in the memory area are blocked, so the brain can’t hit the save button, and that’s why those classic blackout gaps occur after a day of heavy drinking,” he explains. He insists that “every time you consume alcohol, neurons in that area atrophy. When they atrophy, you lose gray matter and it’s replaced by fluid,” something that shows up as black spots on a scan – “what used to be memories is now water.”
Once the hippocampus has fewer neurons, “you lose the ability to create new memories and you say goodbye to the ones you already had.” “Alcohol might help you forget a bad moment, but it also makes you forget your parents, your pets, your happiest moments,” he says, before summing up its effects in blunt terms: “It makes you forget who you are and leaves you unable to store any of the good moments you have from today onward. It makes you stop being you.”
What happens “if you drink until blackout,” he adds, is that ultimately “it’s as if you never lived the party at all, and you kill the potential memories of all the ones that come after.” When you’re young, “your brain tolerates alcohol well because it has a lot of matter to absorb the damage,” but beware of going into debt with your hippocampus, because slowly, “it’s breaking down.”
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