Blackouts can be a pretty common occurrence among those who like to drink excessively.

While some people will choose a night out here or there to behave in such a manner, others make it a habit, opting for a hazy reality over a controlled state.

A writer for The Daily Beast is very concerned over how common the choice to drink to blackout is among women these days:

Blackouts occur when a person is drinking, usually, but not always, to excess, because alcohol interferes with the receptors that record new experiences in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center [sic]. Depending on one’s tolerance, how much one has eaten, and how hydrated one is, blackouts can be either fragmentary, sometimes known as “brownouts” or “grayouts,” or complete. White calls those “en bloc” blackouts, when the person who experiences them remembers nothing.

I’m not a big drinker—I hate feeling out of control. Still, I’m drawn to what pulls people, especially women, to regularly go that far with their drinking.

So: how often do people black out? I spoke to Dr. Aaron White, an expert on blackouts and a senior scientific advisor to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He had a simple answer to my question. “They’re disturbingly common,” he said.

They are especially alarming for women, White said. Among the college students he’s studied for blackout research, he said, responses to them fall across rigid gender lines. “Males wanted to know what they did to the world,” he said, “But women were uneasy, and wanted to know what happened to them.” The notion of sex while a woman was too drunk to consent is particularly frightening.

Of course, there are ways to avoid blackouts, but any seasoned drinker knows the secrets.

Perhaps this summer you should go sober cobra and see how your lifestyle changes. Just, you know, because you can.

[source:thedailybeast]