[ad_1]
On Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford will speak during the Supreme Court's confirmation proceeding against Brett Kavanaugh, who she has accused of sexual assault in high school. Several other women have also presented similar stories in recent days. The question of how alcohol affects memory and the brain and whether these women could remember something that happened to them under the influence is at the center of the investigation.
The answer, experts say Popular scienceWhile drinking can significantly tarnish the memory of a person, traumatic situations can indeed leave a lasting impression, regardless of the level of intoxication.
Alcohol spares no part of the brain, including our memory. "It's a systemic effect," says William Barr, director of neuropsychology at NYU Langone University. "Alcohol is high in your blood and goes to all parts of the brain, which reduces the overall functioning of the brain."
These effects begin after only one or two drinks. The motor function starts to slow down, you start to feel more social and relaxed, and maybe even a little emotional or impulsive. After three or four hours, you will start having an alcohol level close to or greater than 0.08%, the legal limit of driving. The basic instincts, lodged in the limbic system, begin to exceed the superior judgment, controlled in the frontal cortex. Once you start consuming more than six or eight or ten drinks, alcohol can slow down the basic functioning in the most fundamental central parts of our brain that control breathing and heart rate.
As for memory, drinking with the way our brains "code" information, says Barr. There are three stages of memory: encoding, recovery and storage. Encoding is the way we take into account and we recall new memories. We need to pay attention to something to encode it so that we can later recover it from storage, Barr says. That's why when you're distracted or doing something routine like going home on a normal day, you may not always remember to do it.
When you are not drinking, when you are not planning to encode your brain, you can not recover those memories later when you are sober. "Essentially, a high BAC, and especially a rapid increase in BAC resulting from rapid consumption, can hinder the consolidation of memories in long-term memory," Kate writes. Carey, a researcher affiliated with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. , in an email to Popular science.
Alcohol affects everyone a little differently, says Bill Kerr, Senior Scientist and Center Director at the Public Health Institute's Alcohol Research Group. However, the general rule is that the blackout can occur when someone reaches a blood alcohol level of 0.20, says Carey, who consumes an average of four drinks for women and five for men. especially if they are drunk quickly and fasting.
But that does not mean you forget everything during a night of high water consumption, Barr says. "When something important happens that comes to the fore and can still be remembered, they call it alcoholic myopia," he says.
"Memory loss can be complete or partial," writes Carey, who is also a researcher at Brown's Center for Studies in Alcohol and Drug Addiction. If someone knows a total or partial failure, memories will not be stored in long-term memory and will not be recoverable later, says Carey. "Less severe intoxication can lead to fragmentary" power outages, "she writes, in which you can temporarily forget things and remind them later when" good clues are found to get them back. " memories for part of the event while other parts are lost.
When something serious or unusual happens, your drunk brain can and will actually encode that information, even if it can not pay so much attention to peripheral details, Barr says. To go back to the banal example of going home after work, you probably do not remember doing it every night, but you will remember the night when a deer jumps in front of the car.
"So, if you try to apply that to what Dr. Ford says, it would be very likely that she could remember that something bad happened to her and even who did it" said Barr. "But she might not be as precise about exactly where she was, where she was, or what music was playing or who she belonged to or something else."
The idea that a trauma victim is an unreliable witness because of intoxication is not true, says Barr, even though the details become uneven. "Because something like that could be remembered, even if she's drunk."
[ad_2]
Source link
