system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why, when drunk, do we not remember certain things?
gpt
Think of your brain as a space ship and alcohol as a solar storm the ship has to travel through. 

As the solar storm intensifies (more alcohol), the ship has to divert power from other components to maintain power on the shield and protect the ship. One of the first changes is that the AI autopilot (smart decision making) gets switched to a basic manual controls (impaired judgement). 

As the storm intensifies, the captain decides to disable the flight recorder logs to save power. This means that the current flight data (short term memory) is not stored to the archives (long term memory).

This is what happens when we drink too much alcohol. It's not that we lost memories but the alcohol prevents us from recording them in the first place. Low to medium amounts may result in patches of time when memory is not recorded but heavy drinking can result in whole sections of time where you have no memory of what occurred. Alcohol does not erase memories as you generally remember all the events that occurred before you started drinking.