THE SCIENCE OF MEMORY: WHO’S LYING? HARD TO SAY

Blackouts affect the same part of the brain that controls what memories are retained.

“You’re saying there’s never been a case when you drank so much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before, or part of what happened?”

— Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., to Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh during testimony last Thursday

“You’re asking about a blackout. I don’t know, have you?” — Kavanaugh to Klobuchar

As the child of an alcoholic, Amy Klobuchar grew up hypervigilant.

She saw what can happen during booze-filled blackouts, when alcohol stops a person’s brain from functioning properly.

“When you have a parent who is an alcoholic, you are careful about drinking,” she told Kavanaugh Thursday, during the emotion-charged Supreme Court nomination hearing that will go down in history as both a political disgrace and a personal purging.

Klobuchar learned to be responsible and efficient, to “be in charge and take control,” she says in her memoir, because her father, Jim, was a well-known writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and also a well-known alcoholic.

He drank throughout the senator’s childhood and teens.

“He had two DWIs when I was in junior high, and it was on the front page of the paper,” Klobuchar told one interviewer. “Some kid used a key and carved ‘drunk’ on my locker.”

Teens feel humiliation like this more deeply than adults, says therapist Connie Ingram, who practices in Royal Palm Beach — because “the adolescent mind is in the developmental stage of the imaginary audience.”

Teens think everybody is looking at them. Their identities are evolving. When a teen suffers a trauma, it can create “a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity,” Ingram says.

These wounds often turn children of alcoholics into overachievers, Klobuchar told Chris Matthews in 2015. “We like to fix things.”

Her father fixed himself in 1993, after his third DUI charge and the possibility of jail. He has been sober since.

Kavanaugh was on the hot seat last week because a woman he barely knew, Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and Palo Alto University, accused him of sexual assault.

Ford claims this happened 36 years ago at a gathering where teens had been drinking.

Kavanaugh “categorically” denied the charge.

He admitted that he drank when he attended Georgetown Prep.

He said he liked beer in high school, and he likes beer now.

“Sometimes I had too many beers,” he testified. “But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out, and I never sexually assaulted anyone.”

His friends have said he is an upstanding citizen now, and he has been for decades.

His friend Mark Judge — who Ford claims was in the room when Kavanaugh pinned her down on a

ANDREW HARNIK - POOL / GETTY IMAGES Child of an alcoholic: Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., questions Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh about how much he drank in high school and whether he could have blacked out. “When you have a parent who is an alcoholic, you are careful about drinking,” she told Kavanaugh during the emotion-charged nomination hearing.

MICHAEL REYNOLDS - POOL / GETTY IMAGES The nominee: Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh claims he never drank so many beers that he forgot what he was doing and he never sexually assaulted anyone.

SAUL LOEB / POOL / ABACA PRESS / TNS The accuser: Christine Blasey Ford claims Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh pushed her onto a bed, pinned her down, put his hand over her mouth and tried to rip her clothes off. This happened 36 years ago, she claims.