I Can't Retain What I Read Marijuana
Does Marijuana Brand You Forget to Think?
Stoners may not be as forgetful and absent as the stereotype suggests. A new written report finds that heavy marijuana users are just every bit adept every bit everybody else at remembering tasks they demand to do in the futurity.
This ability, called prospective memory, is the brain'southward internal calendar, which keeps rails of your to-do list — the appointment you accept later on in the twenty-four hour period, the end y'all want to make on your way home, medications you need to take every day and and then on. But while forgetting to option up milk is annoying, a lot more can go wrong when prospective memory fails: It's besides what's thought to be responsible when a surgeon forgets to remove a surgical tool before closing up a patient or when a parent leaves a baby in a hot machine.
Heavy use of some drugs such equally alcohol and opioids may impair prospective memory, but there isn't sufficient inquiry on whether marijuana has like effects, said David Diamond, a professor of psychology and molecular pharmacology at the Academy of South Florida who wasn't involved in the new report. "This is an important area of inquiry as marijuana is condign legalized," he said. [7 Ways Marijuana May Impact the Encephalon]
What's on my list today?
To find out whether a marijuana habit can pb to a reject in prospective memory, researchers at University College London in the United Kingdom recruited 36 people who used marijuana almost daily and 18 people who didn't apply the drug.
The participants played a game chosen Virtual Week that mimicked typical daily life scenarios. Throughout each virtual day, participants were assigned a number of tasks that they had to remember to perform at later points in the game.
The two groups scored similarly on the game, correctly recalling their tasks about 80 percent of the time, the study found. Additional tests also revealed no differences between groups in episodic retentivity, the blazon of memory that records past events.
Still, the findings may not apply to all marijuana users, the researchers said. The participants in this study were young, on average 24 years quondam, and were relatively loftier-performance and well-educated, every bit half had at to the lowest degree one university degree.
"Nosotros cannot assume the same results would emerge in older frequent cannabis users, those with lower educational attainment or those seeking treatment for cannabis apply disorder," the researchers wrote in the written report, which was published March 27 in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.
And then at that place's the problem of measuring memory skills in the lab, where scenarios don't fully reverberate real life situations, the researchers said.
"Prospective memory is highly vulnerable to distraction and stress. Then, in the real earth, information technology is very easily impaired," Diamond told Live Science.
Prospective retention can besides conflict with the encephalon's "habit memory" system. For case, yous may program to take a child to day care just end up driving straight to work out of habit. Multitasking and stress make it even more likely for habit retentiveness to take over, Diamond said.
How to save memory
It'southward yet unclear how marijuana affects other kinds of retentivity, and research findings so far are somewhat mixed.
In one surprising report published last year in the periodical Nature Medicine, researchers found that elderly mice treated with the active compound of marijuana, THC, really improved on learning and memory tests. But it'southward unclear how those findings would utilise to humans.
And long-term employ of marijuana may have a different bear upon. In i big study, published in the periodical JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016, researchers followed 3,400 young adults over 25 years and found that marijuana use did not affect any of the cognitive abilities tested, except for verbal memory. That is, people who frequently used marijuana for years remembered fewer items from a list of words than their peers did. The age that a person starts using marijuana is another of import gene. For instance, one report, published in the journal Hippocampus in 2015, plant that young adults who used marijuana every bit teens performed nearly 18 per centum worse than nonusers on a test that required participants to recollect details from a story they had heard twenty minutes before. These and other research findings suggest that marijuana's long-term impact on the encephalon is strongest for those who beginning using the drug in their teens, when their brains are still developing, according to the National Establish on Drug Abuse.
Prospective memory is relatively new to research, and a lot more needs to be done before we fully sympathise how it works in a healthy brain and how it tin be impaired or improved. Two unlike mechanisms appear to assistance u.s. remember that something needs to be done when its time comes up, scientists have proposed. 1 is a mysterious passive mechanism that makes an intention spring to mind, without our explicit command. Another is careful monitoring and actively trying to remember the intensions.
And at that place'south also a tertiary strategy: Use a calendar, or something even simpler: viscous notes.
"I use cues to help me remember important things. I put them on my calendar and use a pasty note in my machine," Diamond said. "Nosotros have to utilise cues and engineering science, because ultimately, the brain is too flawed and retentivity is too frail."
Original article on Live Science .
Bahar Gholipour is a staff reporter for Live Scientific discipline covering neuroscience, odd medical cases and all things health. She holds a Master of Science degree in neuroscience from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, and has done graduate-level work in science journalism at the State Academy of New York at Stony Brook. She has worked as a enquiry assistant at the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives at ENS.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/62406-marijuana-prospective-memory.html
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