A brand new study published in the American journal with the highest impact factor in global, Molecular Psychiatry, reveals that consumers of cannabis are more prone to experiencing memories that are false.
The study was conducted by researchers from the Human Neuropsychopharmacology group in the Biomedical Research Institute of Hospital de Sant Pau and from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with all 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 recollection problems it can cause. Long-Term consumers show more problems than the overall populace in retaining new information and recollections that are regaining. The brand new study also shows that the long-term use of cannabis causes distortions in memory, making it easier for recollections that are fictional or false to appear.
On occasions, the brain can recall things that never occurred. Our recollection is made up of malleable procedure which is created progressively and so is subject to distortions or even false memories. These memory "mistakes" are seen more frequently in several neurological and psychiatric disorders, but can be observed in the healthy people, and become more common as we age. One of the most typical false memories we have are from our childhood which we believe to remember because the people 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 complicated cognitive task which enables us to have our own sense of reality and also shapes our behaviour, based on past experiences.
In the study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, researchers from Sant Pau and Bellvitge compared a group of chronic consumers of cannabis to a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) healthy control group on learning a succession of words while they worked. After a couple of minutes they were once more shown the first 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 believed to have seen the connected new words that were semantically to a higher degree than participants in the control group. By using magnetic resonance imaging, researchers discovered that cannabis consumers revealed a lower activation in areas of the brain associated with the general control of cognitive resources and to memory processes.
The analysis found memory deficiencies regardless of the fact that participants had quit have cannabis before participating in the study. Although they had not have the drug in a month, the more the patient had used cannabis throughout their life, the lower the degree of action in the hippocampus, crucial to keeping memories.
The results show that cannabis consumers are more exposed to enduring memory distortions weeks after not have the drug. This suggests that cannabis has a prolonged effect on the brain mechanisms which allow us to discern between fictional and real events. These memory errors can cause issues because of the effects the testimonies of witnesses as well as their victims can have, for example, in legal cases. Nevertheless, from a clinical viewpoint, the results point to the fact that a chronic utilization of cannabis could worsen problems with age-associated memory loss.
