Hello there,
Think back to that time when you woke up in bed, staircase (hello MK)…[insert your marked zone],
without the slightest idea of how you ended up there.
Blacking out is a quasi-social neurological phenomenon characterized by alcohol-induced memory loss for events that happened while intoxicated. But for a majority of us, that’s as far as we go. We blackout as to how – and why it happens.
But first, a true 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.
Here we go!!
How Did I Get Here?
Perhaps the scariest aspect of blacking out is that ‘you can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you’re drunk’, according to Aaron White, one of the world’s leading experts on blackouts.
When we rush to the dive bars for pre-gaming, the first part of the brain to take a slow-hit is the frontal lobe. A region of our brain that governs attention, motivation, planning, and learning. It makes us a little dumber, less capable of handling competing complicated considerations.
By the time, your third friend is ordering their round of shots, alcohol moseys over to the amygdala, a switchboard for our fight-flight-freeze mechanism, and turns it down a notch.
Afterward is when you make a transit of two kinds. One to the high-end bar to wee away the night. The other to the State of Myopia. In transit, your brainpower is muzzled to handle less complex, long-term considerations.
New Bar, More Money, More Hits. Two-three drinks later. “You” become an altered version. Some a stripped-down distilled version of their sober self. And as the ancient saying goes, in vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.” A stage that is mother to storytelling.
The guys behind Johnny “Walker” must have known alcohol’s defining trait.
The steam makes its way to the back station called Cerebellum. The HQ for balance and coordination.™️ By now, the HQ services have been interrupted due to coopted instability.
The weather station forecasting a storm in the hippocampus—small, sausage-like regions flanking the command centre, responsible for forming memories about our lives.
Scientists advise that, once the station hits the .08 mark – the legal level of intoxication —the hippocampus will start to struggle. At 0.20, fragmented blackouts will flicker on and off the brain and at 0.30% en bloc blackouts total darkness.
Here is the most interesting bit.
At or around the 0.15 mark, the hippocampus experiences interrupted coverage and starts playing paper and scissors. Some memories are recorded. Others aren’t. For others, nothing at all. Total shutdown.
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.
Next time you blackout, at least don’t blackout on the why and how.
Best Stuff I Read
1. Abubakari II, King of the Mali Empire
There are multiple sources stating that Abubakari II, King of the Mali Empire, led Malian sailors to the Americas in 1311…Almost 200 years before Columbus arrived.
The gold that Columbus himself found in the Americas at the time has been demonstrated to be the same alloy as that of West Africa. The word used for gold by native Americans was ‘guanin’ – which is very similar to the Mandinka word for gold ‘ghanin’
In his journals, Columbus mentions that Native Americans confirmed that “Black-skinned people had come from the South-East in boats, trading in gold-tipped spears.”
Skeletons of black people were found in pre-Columbus graves in the Virgin Islands. Archaeologists have also discovered skeletons in Central America and South America.
If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.
At first, that sounds crazy. But let’s start with the premise: is the proximate purpose of technology to reduce scarcity? Think about how a breakthrough is described: faster, smaller, cheaper, better. All of these words mean that with this new technology, one can do more with less.
Is the ultimate purpose of technology to eliminate mortality? Well, mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had infinite time, we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has value is because human life has value, and lifespans are finite. If you made lifespans much longer, you’d reduce the effective cost of everything.
Thus insofar as reducing scarcity is acknowledged to be the proximate purpose of technology, eliminating the main source of scarcity – namely mortality – is the ultimate purpose of technology. Life extension is the most important thing we can invent.
What I’m Watching
One of the strongest pieces of evidence to support the fact that Africans sailed to America before Christopher Columbus was a journal entry from Columbus himself.
Feel free to shoot me an email anytime with comments, critiques, and open-ended questions.
Till next Saturday, take care.
Happy weekend ?
Solomon Muigai.