Party too hard in your 20s? How it can affect your brain in the long term

Blackout drinking at a young age can have lasting effects on learning, memory and our ability to recognize faces, new research finds.

“Alcohol-related blackouts tend to occur when an individual drinks a large amount of alcohol in a short period of time, resulting in a rapid increase in blood alcohol concentration (BAC),” said Sara A. Lorkiewicz, a neuropsychology postdoctoral fellow at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston.

Although alcohol affects everyone differently, blackouts often start when a person’s BAC reaches about 0.16% — twice the legal driving limit, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Blacking out and passing out are often used interchangeably when they are different. A person who passes out loses consciousness or falls asleep, while someone who blacks out is awake but won’t remember what happened.

“In other words, new memories are not being formed,” Lorkiewicz explained. “Intoxicated individuals have not passed out, but are consciously interacting with their environment, and later experience anterograde amnesia for some or all details from that drinking event.”

Over a six-year period, Lorkiewicz followed a group of people 12 to 24 years old who were enrolled in a national study of the effects of alcohol use on young brains.

She found that the fusiform gyrus — which has been tied to the processing of visual information related to faces and bodies — was sensitive to the cumulative effects of alcohol use early on.

Lorkiewicz’s team also determined that episodes of heavy drinking affect the hippocampus later in development. That region of the brain transfers short-term memories like vision, smell and sound to long-term storage.

The study findings were discussed Monday in Minneapolis at the annual scientific meeting of the Research Society on Alcohol.

Youth binge drinking is common — in one study, 80% of students reported blacking out at least once in college.

Lorkiewicz pointed out that past research found that these incidents impair the drinker’s ability to learn and remember visual information, including people.

“In the real world, this may look like a lower-than-expected performance in school/work or inability to form social relationships,” Lorkiewicz said.

“It is important to understand the potential risks involved with such behavior,” she added.