'Taylor Swift Fans' 'Joy Blackouts' Are Completely Normal'

 In an appearance on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" on Wednesday night, Taylor Swift described how fans who attended shows during her Eras Tour experienced "joy blackouts" -- they couldn't remember large swaths of the performance.

Psychiatrists say this is completely normal, and can happen in any situation that brings intense emotion.

"My whole life, I've been trying to study, like, how do you not just entertain people, but really transport them out of their problems, their life, their stresses. How do you really create a sense of escape?" Swift told Colbert.

"I was reading articles where it's like, medical professionals are diagnosing ... all these fans who came to the Eras Tour with post-concert amnesia," she continued. "They were getting, like, joy blackouts. And I was like, 'Oh, I think this one's different, I think this tour's different.'"

During the peak of her Eras Tour, there were reports about post-concert amnesia among concert-goers, which experts said is a completely normal phenomenon.

"It is real. It is not all in people's heads," Joel Stoddard, MD, a child psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz in Aurora, told MedPage Today. "It doesn't matter if the emotion is positive or negative. ... Your hippocampus can sometimes go offline."

Stoddard explained that the hippocampus is responsible for "continuously recording and setting down memories of what's going on in our daily lives. It can get overwhelmed, too, and it can't do its job, usually in times of high stress."

Stress, Stoddard said, is "just the body's reaction to something exciting happening, whether it's good or bad. Glucocorticoids get dumped into your bloodstream, there's a huge sympathetic discharge. The hippocampus is unable to do its job because it gets disrupted."

All of the sensory inputs from a concert, on top of the emotional nature of the music, can easily disrupt the hippocampus and prevent it from committing those experiences to long-term memory, he said.

It's not just Taylor Swift concerts where this can happen, noted Jessi Gold, MD, MS, chief wellness officer for the University of Tennessee system in Memphis.

"Sometimes people get married and say, 'I can't remember any of it, it was a blur,'" Gold told MedPage Today. "'There were a lot of people and there was a lot to do, how am I going to be able to pinpoint any one thing?'"

"You're in the moment, feeling things, and not processing the details as a result," she said.

Gold herself didn't experience hippocampal dysfunction when she attended four shows during the Eras Tour, but she understands how it can happen, she said. Fans will have the chance to jog their memories when the six-part docuseries about the tour, "The End of an Era," is released on Disney Plus on Friday.

"You may have warm feelings but can't remember the play-by-play," Gold said. "Then, watching it may help connect to your emotions and then you do remember. That would be a good way of putting it all together."

There's no real medical term for post-concert amnesia, Stoddard and Gold said. The fight-or-flight response is at play, and Stoddard said the closest comparable condition may be transient global amnesia -- but what so-called "Swifties" experience is a much less dramatic form.

One similarity the phenomenon has with transient global amnesia, Stoddard said, is that it's also short-term, and "one's memory is just fine after that."

Fans don't seem to be too worried about their experiences with post-concert amnesia, and that's the right way to look at it, Gold said.

"While it can be disappointing and a little scary to not remember something you were excited about, it's not a bad thing," she said. "It's pretty normal."

Before the next concert, Gold said, someone who previously experienced this phenomenon "might anticipate that you're really excited about a concert and you might not remember everything about it."

"That doesn't mean you didn't like it in the moment," Gold said. "And it doesn't mean it wasn't worth it."

https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/cultureclinic/118983