Unless you’ve been blissfully unplugged, you must have come across the term "blackout" lately. And you may have thought it means inebriated to the point of unconsciousness. Falling-down drunk. Blotto.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appears to think so, based on this exchange last Thursday during his fiery self-defense before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"Have you ever passed out from drinking?" queried Rachel Mitchell, the Republicans’ hired-hand prosecutor. "Passed out would be…no. But I’ve gone to sleep. But…but I’ve never blacked out," Kavanaugh replied. "That’s the…allegation, and that…that’s wrong."

But that notion of an alcohol-induced blackout is wrong.

A less-confusing term might be “alcohol-induced amnesia.” It can be total. Hours of experience and events can be totally missing from memory. Or it can be spotty. Either way, it can be hard to impossible for a bystander, or even the inebriated person, to know when it’s happened.

Misunderstanding blackouts has big implications. The phenomenon could reconcile the total disconnect between what psychologist Christine Blasey Ford says she remembers so indelibly about an alleged sexual assault by Kavanaugh one summer evening 36 years ago and Kavanaugh’s categorical denial that it ever happened.

Alcohol-induced amnesia could be involved in uncountable occasions of alcohol-fogged bad behavior. Understanding it is also crucial to untangling many allegations that flow from the #MeToo movement — and the growing backlash from accused perpetrators and their defenders.

Not remembering doesn’t excuse a bad actor from responsibility. But the possibility does require more and different kinds of probing for the truth. As we’re seeing with Kavanaugh, that can mean searching out more information about the circumstances surrounding the event, the drinking habits of the accused, others’ knowledge and observations.

To understand the challenge I called Dr. Richard Saitz, chair of Boston University School of Public Health’s Department of Community Health Sciences, a veteran researcher of alcohol abuse and an addiction medicine specialist at Boston Medical Center. Our conversation, edited:

There’s been recent confusion about alcohol-related blackouts — what they are and what they aren’t. What’s been your reaction to the use of the term lately?

Many people confuse the idea of a blackout with someone who's had so much to drink that they are unarousable — they're not awake and they don't know what's going on. That’s not at all the case. A blackout is when you don't remember what happened. You can appear to be completely awake. An observer can't tell when someone is in the midst of not forming a memory.

The second common misconception is that having a blackout is characteristic of an alcohol use disorder more commonly called alcoholism — that you only have blackouts if you have an alcohol use disorder. And that's just not true.

It's a curious phenomenon — a very selective kind of temporary memory impairment. What’s going on in there?

It involves those parts of the brain that are required to take in what's happening and allow you to remember it later. You might remember it two or three minutes later but not 10 hours later or two days later or ever again, because it didn't get permanently encoded by the brain. It probably happens in the hippocampus and it involves the frontal lobes of the brain as well.

What touches it off?

If you drink a substantial amount quickly, you might experience a blackout. Drinking games would be an example of that because that's the point of the game.