Cannabis customers exhibit greater susceptibility to become able to false memories
A new study published in the American journal with the highest impact factor in worldwide, Molecular Psychiatry, reveals that consumers of cannabis are more prone to experiencing memories that are false.
The analysis 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 the Brain Cognition and Plasticity group of the Bellvitge Institute for Biomedical Research (IDIBELL - University of Barcelona). One of the known consequences of have this drug is the recollection issues it can cause. Long-Term consumers reveal more issues compared to the general citizenry in retaining new information and regaining recollections. The new study also reveals that the chronic use of cannabis causes distortions in memory, making it simpler for imagined or fictitious memories to seem.
On occasions, the brain can remember things which never happened. Our recollection consists of a malleable process that is post-traumatic stress disorder created progressively and hence is subject to distortions or false memories. These recollection "mistakes" are seen more often in several neurological and psychiatric disorders, but may also be detected in the healthy population, and become more common as we age. One of the most frequent false memories we have are of scenarios from our childhood which we believe to recall because the people around us have explained them to us over and over again. Maintaining an adequate control over the "veracity" of our memories is a complicated cognitive task which allows us to have our own sense of reality as well as shapes our behavior, based on previous 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 healthy control group while they worked on learning a series of words. After a couple of minutes they were 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 first list. Cannabis consumers believed to have already seen the semantically new words that were connected to a higher degree than participants in the control group. Researchers found that cannabis consumers revealed a lower activation in areas of the brain related to memory procedures and to the overall control of cognitive resources, by using magnetic resonance imaging.
The analysis found recollection deficiencies despite the fact that participants had quit consuming cannabis one month before participating in the analysis. 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 activity in the hippocampus, essential to keeping memories.
The results demonstrate that cannabis consumers are somewhat more vulnerable to suffering memory distortions, even weeks after not have the drug. This suggests that cannabis has a prolonged effect on the brain mechanisms which enable us to distinguish between actual and imaginary events. These memory errors can cause issues because of the effects the testimonies of their casualties and witnesses can have, for instance, in legal cases. Nevertheless, from a clinical standpoint, the results point to the fact that a long-term use of cannabis could worsen issues with age-associated memory loss.