blackout that feels like going into a black hole

It starts pumping out glucose-the brain’s favorite molecule for fueling memory, thinking, and learning-from your liver into your bloodstream. There’s a scientific, biological explanation for exactly what happens when you get this excited (which the body sees as a state of stress). “But too much excitement pushes you over the edge in terms of memory formation, and you’re unable to make memories.” “If you’re slightly on edge, with a little bit of excitement, you’ll actually remember better,” McNay says. That makes it “really hard” to form new memories. As the body’s stress levels increase-in response to exciting or distressing factors-the neurons associated with memory start firing indiscriminately. People getting married, for example, often say they can’t remember their first dance, or if their Aunt Josephine was there. “This is not a concert-specific phenomenon-it can happen any time you’re in a highly emotional state,” he says. So what’s going on? For starters, people might simply be too excited, explains Ewan McNay, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany. “Yet I know it did, because my bank account took a $950 hit to cover the ticket.” Looking back, it feels like “an out-of-body experience, as though it didn’t really happen to me,” she says. That resonates with Nicole Booz, 32, of Gettysburg, Pa., who attended Swift’s May 14 show in Philadelphia. “You’re having all these emotions while your favorite songs are playing, and you’re like, ‘Wow, where am I?’” “It’s hard to put together what you actually witness,” she says. During the hour-long wait to exit the stadium, she started re-listening to the setlist, asking her friends: “Did she really play that? How much of it did she play?” Tocatlian chalks it up to sensory overload-and the fact that she had been dreaming about the big night for so long, it was difficult to grasp it was really happening. “If I didn’t have the 5-minute video that my friend kindly took of me jamming to it, I probably would have told everyone that it didn’t happen,” she says. She got to hear her top choice for one of Swift’s nightly “surprise songs”- Better Man-and the experience still feels surreal. “Post-concert amnesia is real,” says Tocatlian, 25, who lives in New York. But something felt weird when she tried to relive the memories: in her mind, where vivid specifics of the concert should have been playing on loop, there was just a blank space. Three days after Jenna Tocatlian saw Taylor Swift perform at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, she was still on cloud nine.

Blackout that feels like going into a black hole