question: Why does it take you so long to remember drunken memories?
comment: Your brain stores memories in two ways— short term, then long term. Your short term memory center collects everything as you experience it, and stores it in a temporary holding place until it can process it and convert it over to long term memory. Use of alcohol affects your short term memory most (it affects long term a little, but it really hits short term hardest.) if you’ve had enough to drink that it would affect your short-term memory, then it would take some time to convert and your memories would get caught up in the clutter and the shuffle between short and long term. If you drink too much, you can “blackout“ and lose your short-term memory entirely for a bit. You’re conscious and present for the memories in real time, obviously, but they’ll fail to make it to long-term at all and you won’t remember them later. prolonged alcohol use will deteriorate the systems as well.
passages: One example is "The Hangover", where three groomsmen lose the groom during a bachelor party in Las Vegas, so they retrace their steps to find him. The characters still had functioning implicit/procedural memory, which allowed them to carry out the many acts they performed that night, but their episodic memory was impaired and thus they had no recollection of the events occurring. In addition to alcohol the characters were also under the influence of flunitrazepam.
  
  Another movie is "What Happens in Vegas". After an intoxicated night in "Sin City," two people wake-up to find they got married.
   Section::::Prospective memory.
   Section::::In popular culture.
  
  The memory inhibiting effects of alcohol are often a prominent topic in popular culture. It appears in movies, books, and television shows. Several movies show characters drinking alcohol to the point of memory loss and awakening the next morning with a host of problems due to actions they performed while intoxicated.
   Section::::Short-term memory.:Tasks and intoxication findings.
   Songs such as "Waking Up in Vegas" by Katy Perry and "Last Name" by Carrie Underwood also depict characters waking up and not remembering the night before due to alcohol consumption.
  
  By some accounts, popular culture makes light of the memory problems that can result from alcohol consumption.
  
  The court case R. v. Daviault [1994] concerned the viability of a legal defense based on intoxication.
  
  Law and Order: Special Victims Unit; in season 11 episode 4, Hammered, a recovering alcoholic was coerced to drink by a business partner and later wakes up to a dead woman in his bed.
   Long-term memory (LTM) has both a long duration and a large capacity. Memories that are stored in LTM can last from a few days to a lifetime. LTM consists of both explicit memory (requiring conscious awareness) and implicit memory (unconscious awareness). Information selected for LTM goes through three processes. First of all, in the encoding stage, information from the senses is incorporated into mental activity in the form of a memory. Secondly, storage involves taking this information and holding it indefinitely in memory. Lastly, retrieval is the ability to recall information from the long-term memory storage. Each of these processes can be affected by alcohol.
   Research has shown that heavy alcohol use clearly leads to deficits in memory. Less is known about the effects of alcohol on day-to-day memory function, specifically, prospective memory, remembering to do things at some future point in time. The results of a study conducted by Heffernan et al. (2010) suggest that binge drinking in the teenage years leads to impairments in everyday prospective memory. A study by Heffernan and O'Neill (2011) further investigated the effect has alcohol on time-based prospective memory and concluded that binge drinking was associated with significantly reduced performance on time-based tasks.
   Section::::Effects on working memory.:In the long term.
   To celebrate their six-month anniversary, Long Island socialites Tony and Carlotta Milburn arrange a wild drinking party with friends, culminating in a stop at the restaurant owned by Faronea. They are unaware that Faronea is conspiring with Baptiste Bouclier, the chauffeur of party host Vic Huling, to kidnap Vic. The next morning the Milburns awake hung over to find Vic dead from a gunshot through the heart and his wife Bette missing. Tony calls his friend, district attorney Danny Harrison to investigate. Bette arrives with Billy Arliss at whose home she had slept. Because of their excessive drinking, no one can remember anything about what had happened the night before. As circumstantial evidence mounts against Tony, he calls in hypnotist Professor Karl Jones to help everyone try to recover their memories. Just as the professor is about to reveal the murderer, he is murdered.
   Implicit memory does not require conscious effort or intention for recall. It occurs when previous experience influences performance on a certain task. This is evident in priming experiments. Implicit memory includes procedural memory, which influences our everyday behaviours, such as riding a bike or tying shoes. People can perform these abilities without even thinking about them, which means procedural memory functions automatically. While retrieval of explicit memory is severely impaired by alcohol, retrieval of implicit memory is not. Intoxicated subjects score higher on recognition tasks (involving implicit memory) than they can on recall tasks (involving explicit memory).
  
  Section::::Short-term memory.
   In another study which looked at subjective responses to alcohol as a prime for 21st birthday alcohol consumption, subjective responses to the initial drink were viewed as a prime for more alcohol consumption during 21st birthday celebrations. Current findings show that subjective responses to alcohol have direct effects on both the final BAC achieved and on the experiences of blackouts and hangover that are not explained by level of intoxication. Where a variety of social factors, such as peer pressure and 21st birthday traditions such as 21 shots may influence the amount of alcohol people consume, their subjective experiences with alcohol have clear influences on both consumption and the physiological consequences of drinking. These physiological responses to alcohol may have a biological vulnerability that extends beyond the dose-dependent effects of alcohol.
   Remember Last Night?
  
  Remember Last Night? is a 1935 American mystery comedy film directed by James Whale. The film, based on the novel "The Hangover Murders", is about the investigation of the murder of one of a group of friends. The survivors are unable to recall the events of the night of the murder because they were all too drunk. "Remember Last Night?" features an ensemble cast headed by Edward Arnold, Constance Cummings, and Robert Young.
   Research shows that individuals are less likely to remember information learned while intoxicated when they are once again sober. However, information learned or memories created while intoxicated are most effectively retrieved when the individual is in a similar state of intoxication.
   Anterograde amnesia, colloquially referred to as "blacking out", is another symptom of heavy drinking. This is the loss of memory during and after an episode of drinking. When alcohol is consumed at a rapid rate, the point at which most healthy people's long-term memory creation starts failing usually occurs at approximately 0.20% BAC, but it can be reached as low as 0.14% BAC for inexperienced drinkers.
   Section::::Effects on working memory.
  
  Working memory allows one to keep things in mind while simultaneously performing complex tasks. It involves a system for both the temporary storage and the manipulation of information, subsequently forming a crucial link between perception and controlled action. Evidence suggests that working memory involves three components: the "central executive" which controls attention, the "visuo-spatial sketchpad" which holds and manipulates spatial information, and the "phonological loop" which performs a similar function for auditory and speech-based information.
  
  Section::::Effects on working memory.:In the short term.
   Section::::Mode of actions.:Molecular effects on GABA and NMDA receptors.
   how memory and learning were affected by morphine. They found that when mice learned a response under the influence of morphine, they later performed it most efficiently under the influence of morphine. When mice learned the response free of morphine, they recalled it best when similarly sober. And for mice that were taught the response under the
  
  influence of morphine, once the drug wore off, they suffered amnestic effects; they could no longer remember the learned response.
   Retrieval of explicit memory is significantly impaired by alcohol. When compared to sober participants, intoxicated participants performed quite poorly on a recall task for everyday events (i.e., episodic memory). Intoxicated participants are also slower to respond in reaction time tasks. Alcohol also impairs retrieval in word recognition tasks. When both encoding and retrieval take place during intoxication, there are surprisingly more impairments for cued recall than for free recall. In terms of gender differences in retrieval processes, females tend to score lower than males on recall tasks when intoxicated.
  
  Section::::Long-term memory.:Implicit memory.
   Short-term memory refers to the temporary storage of small amounts of information over short delays. Digit span refers to the proposed number of pieces of information (5-9) that can be held in short-term memory. This is also referred to as the magic number seven – plus or minus two. Any more pieces of information than this, and newer items replace previous items. Alcohol intoxication has been found to have dissociative effects on both short-term memory and cognitive functioning.
  
  Section::::Short-term memory.:Brain areas affected by alcohol.
   Blackouts, a form of amnesia that occurs in binge drinkers may be due to suppressed hippocampus function with rebound NMDA (glutamate) activity combined with excessive glucocorticoid release induced by the stress of repeated intoxication followed by acute withdrawal/abstinence is the proposed mechanism of neural kindling leading to neurotoxicity of structures involved in learning and memory within the brain of binge drinkers. Frontal lobe processing may become impaired as a result of binge drinking with resultant neurocognitive deficits and impaired working memory.
   "Prospective memory" involves remembering to carry out an intended action in the future without an explicit reminder. Alcohol has been found to impair this ability. Chronic heavy alcohol users report significantly more prospective forgetting compared to low-dose and alcohol-free controls. The Prospective Memory Questionnaire assesses short-term habitual prospective memory, long-term episodic prospective memory, and internally cued prospective memory. Chronic heavy alcohol users reported significantly greater deficits for all three aspects of prospective memory. Individuals that report heavy alcohol use report 24% more difficulties with prospective memory than those who report that they are light drinkers and 30% more difficulties than those who report that they never drink. The effects of alcohol on prospective memory can also be assessed in the laboratory by simulating prospective memory tasks that individuals face in everyday life. Individuals who are given 0.6 g/kg alcohol prior to performing prospective memory tasks do significantly poorer than a placebo group. Alcohol can damage the prefrontal and frontal areas of the brain, and this may be responsible for prospective memory impairments since prospective memory performance is highly correlated with frontal executive functions.
   High doses of alcohol severely disrupt the storage process of semantic memories. Alcohol was found to impair the storage of novel stimuli but not that of previously learned information. Since alcohol affects the central nervous system, it hinders semantic storage functioning by restricting the consolidation of the information from encoding.
   In one study, a sample of individuals was gathered and divided into groups based on whether they had a fragmentary blackout within the last year or not. Groups were also divided based on those who had received alcohol and those who had not. In their beverage challenge, participants were given one drink per ten minutes until the target of .08%BAC was achieved. Drinks for the alcohol condition contained a 3:1 ratio of mixer to vodka. After 30 minutes, breathalyzer samples were recorded and recorded every 30 minutes thereafter. In the test for narrative recall those who received alcohol and FB+(those who admitted to having a fragmentary blackout within the last year) recalled fewer narrative details after a 30-minute delay, but there were no significant interaction effects. The next day participants were called and tested on their narrative recall and cued recall and the results were that those who consumed alcohol showed poorer 30-minute delay recall and next-day recall than those who did not consume alcohol, but there were no significant effects on cued recall of details. Their study also revealed that those who were FB+ and consumed alcohol also performed worse on contextual recall than the other participants.
   Alcoholism can enhance state-dependent memory as well. In a study comparing the state-dependent memory effects of alcohol on both subjects with alcoholism and subjects without alcoholism, researchers found that the alcoholic subjects showed greater effects for state-dependent memory on tasks of recall and free association. This is not because alcohol better produces associations, but because the person with alcoholism lives a larger portion of their life under the influence of alcohol. This produces changes in cognition and so when the person with alcoholism drinks, the intoxication primes their brain towards certain associations made in similar states. Essentially, the intoxicated and sober states of the alcoholic are in fact, different from the intoxicated and sober states of the non-alcoholic person, whose body is not as used to processing such large amounts of the substance. For this reason, we see slightly larger effects of state-dependent memory while intoxicated for chronic drinkers than for those who do not drink often.
   "Dr. Abel informed me," says Mr. Combe [presumably George Combe], "of an Irish porter to a warehouse, who forgot, when sober, what he had done when drunk: but, being drunk, again recollected the transactions of his former state of intoxication. On one occasion, being drunk, he had lost a parcel of some value, and in his sober moments could give no account of it. Next time he was intoxicated, he recollected that he had left the parcel at a certain house, and there being no address on it, it had remained there safely, and was got on his calling for it." This man must have had two souls, one for his sober state, and one for him when drunk.
  