A brand new study published in the American journal with the maximum impact factor in world-wide, Molecular Psychiatry, reveals that consumers of cannabis are more prone to experiencing false memories.
The study was conducted by researchers from the Human Neuropsychopharmacology group at the Biomedical Research Institute of Hospital de Sant Pau and from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with all PTSD group the Brain Cognition and Plasticity group of the Bellvitge Institute for Biomedical Research (IDIBELL - University of Barcelona). One of the known effects of consuming this drug is the memory problems it can cause. Long-Term consumers show more problems in relation to the general public in retaining new info and memories that are recovering. The brand new study also shows that the chronic utilization of cannabis causes distortions in memory, which makes it simpler for bogus or unreal memories to appear.
On occasions, the brain can remember things that never happened. Our memory is made up of malleable procedure that is created increasingly and consequently is subject to distortions or false memories. These recollection "mistakes" are seen more often in several neurological and psychiatric disorders, but may also be found in the healthy people, and become more common as we age. One of the very frequent false memories we have are from our youth which we believe to remember as the folks around us have described them to us over and over again of scenarios. Keeping an adequate control over the "veracity" of our memories is a complex cognitive task which allows us to have our own awareness of reality as well as shapes our behaviour, based on past encounters.
In the study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, researchers from Sant Pau and Bellvitge compared a group of long-term consumers of cannabis to a healthy control group on learning a succession of words, while they worked. After a few minutes they were once again shown the original words, together with new words which were either semantically related or unrelated. All participants were asked to identify the words belonging to the initial list. Cannabis consumers considered to have already seen the new words that were related that were semantically to a higher degree than participants in the control group. By using magnetic resonance imaging, researchers found that cannabis consumers showed a lower activation in areas of the brain associated with memory procedures and to the general control of cognitive resources.
The analysis found recollection deficiencies regardless of the fact that participants had quit consuming cannabis before participating in the study. Although they had not consumed the drug in a month, the more the patient had used cannabis throughout their life, the lower the amount of action in the hippocampus, crucial to storing memories.
The results demonstrate that cannabis consumers are more vulnerable to suffering memory distortions, even weeks after not consuming the drug. This indicates that cannabis has a protracted effect on the brain mechanisms which allow us to discern between real and fictional events. These memory mistakes can cause problems in legal cases, for instance, due to the effects the testimonies of their victims and witnesses can have. However, from a clinical standpoint, the results point to the fact that a long-term utilization of cannabis could worsen issues with age-associated memory loss.
