Alcohol is actually quite a powerful amnestic drug, which means that it prevents the formation of new long-term memories, and this amnestic effect – this effect on memory – is graded, so it depends on how much you drink; the more you drink, the worse your memory becomes.And it’s generally only memory for new things – learning new facts, learning about new events and so on.

　　酒精是非常强效的导致失忆的药物，这就意味着它会阻止你长期记忆的形成，不过该遗忘症会慢慢减弱，所以说，它主要取决于你喝了多少酒，你喝的越多，你失忆越厉害。通常仅仅是对新事物没有印象，比如新的事实，或者新的事件等等。

　　Someone who has drunk a lot of alcohol can still recall very well events from the past, and they can even learn some new bits of information as long as they are only required to recall them over a short period of time.

　　一些喝大了的人都能很好的回忆出久远的事情，只要没过太长时间，他们也能想起刚刚知道的新信息。

　　The problem happens when we ask people to remember things for longer periods of time. Blackouts are a more pronounced form of amnesia, and they happen when – particularly in people who perhaps haven’t developed a strong tolerance to alcohol and drink a lot of alcohol in a short period of time,

　　问题是，当过了很长时间，我们要求他们回忆一些事情时，他们的脑海一片空白，典型的遗忘症，对于那些不太喝酒，但又在短时间内，喝了好多酒的人，更是如此。

　　so binge drinking – and what seems to happen there is that the brain mechanisms that are involved in converting short-term memories into long-term memories is completely disrupted and there’s no possibility of forming a long-term memory when alcohol concentrations are so high.

　　所以如果你纵情饮酒，大脑中，将短期记忆转化为长期记忆的机制就会受到影响，而当酒精度特别高的时候，更是无法形成长期记忆。

　　Under those circumstances people can have very disturbing and frightening experiences because, in addition to having impaired judgement, they can’t remember at all what happened when they were drinking, and that leaves them to try to fill in the details of those events, and that could lead to all kinds of ideas about terrible things that might have happened.

　　在这种情况下，人们通常会有非常困惑或者惊恐的经历，他们无法回忆起，喝醉酒后，发生了什么。为了填补这些空白，他们回努力思考，甚至会臆想出很多根本没有发生在他们身上的事情。