Page 98 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

alcohol level of 0.15—the hippocampus simply shuts down entirely.
“In the true, pure blackout,” White said, “there’s just nothing. Nothing to recall.”
In one of the earliest studies of blackouts, an alcohol researcher named Donald Goodwin
gathered ten men from an unemployment line in St. Louis, gave them each the better part of a bottle
of bourbon over a four-hour period, then had them perform a series of memory tests. Goodwin
writes:
One such event was to show the person a frying pan with a lid on it, suggest that he might be
hungry, take off the lid, and there in the pan are three dead mice. It can be said with confidence
that sober individuals will remember this experience, probably for the rest of their lives.
But the bourbon drinkers? Nothing. Not thirty minutes later, and not the next morning. The three
dead mice never got recorded at all.
In a blackout state—in that window of extreme drunkenness before their hippocampus comes
back online—drunks are like ciphers, moving through the world without retaining anything.
Goodwin once began an essay on blackouts with the following story:
A thirty-nine-year-old salesman awoke in a strange hotel room. He had a mild hangover but
otherwise felt normal. His clothes were hanging in the closet; he was clean-shaven. He dressed
and went down to the lobby. He learned from the clerk that he was in Las Vegas and that he had
checked in two days previously. It had been obvious that he had been drinking, the clerk said, but
he had not seemed very drunk. The date was Saturday the 14th. His last recollection was of
sitting in a St. Louis bar on Monday the 9th. He had been drinking all day and was drunk, but
could remember everything perfectly until about 3 p.m., when “like a curtain dropping,” his
memory went blank. It remained blank for approximately five days. Three years later, it was still
blank. He was so frightened by the experience that he abstained from alcohol for two years.

The salesman had left the bar in St. Louis, gone to the airport, bought a plane ticket, flown to Las
Vegas, found a hotel, checked in, hung up his suit, shaved, and apparently functioned perfectly well
in the world, all while in blackout mode. That’s the way blackouts work. At or around the 0.15
mark, the hippocampus shuts down and memories stop forming, but it is entirely possible that the
frontal lobes, cerebellum, and amygdala of that same drinker—at the same time—can continue to
function more or less normally.
“You can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you’re drunk,” White said.
You’re just not going to remember it. That could be ordering stuff on Amazon. People tell me
this all the time.…People can do very complicated things. Buy tickets, travel, all kinds of things,
and not remember.

It follows that it’s really hard to tell, just by looking at someone, whether they’ve blacked out.
It’s like trying to figure out if someone has a headache exclusively from the expression on their
face. “I might look a little drunk, I might look wasted, but I can talk to you,” White said.

I can have a conversation with you. I can go get us drinks. I can do things that require short-term
storage of information. I can talk to you about our growing up together.…Even wives of hardcore
alcoholics say they can’t really tell when their spouse is or is not in a blackout. 4
When Goodwin was doing his pioneering work in the 1960s, he assumed that only alcoholics got
blackout drunk. Blackouts were rare. Scientists wrote about them in medical journals the way they
would about a previously unknown disease. Take a look at the results of one of the first
comprehensive surveys of college drinking habits. It was conducted in the late 1940s and early
1950s, at twenty-seven colleges around the United States. Students were asked how much they
drank, on average, “at a sitting.” (For the purposes of the question, drinking amounts were divided
into three groups. “Smaller” meant no more than two glasses of wine, two bottles of beer, or two
mixed drinks. “Medium” was from three to five beers or glasses of wine, or three to four mixed
drinks. And “Larger” was anything above that.)

Beer