High Thread - Page 627

On November 06 2011 21:45 FallDownMarigold wrote:


It's cool that your anecdotal experience says weed makes you better at certain things. Here's what some research says though:

Smoking smoke weed lets THC act on your CB1 receptors at the brain. Normally, the main endogenous ligand for CB1 receptor is anandamide, a hormone involved in a variety of different signaling pathways. Anandamide is associated with appetite and "forgetting" pathways.

In one study, researchers constitutively inactivated CB1 receptors. In other words, it would be like making it so that you turned off the effect anandamide normally has. What should be obvious at this point is that the researchers developed a model for looking at the first layer of the mechanism in your brain that responds to THC from weed. They completely knocked out CB1 responsiveness to anandamide, which implies they generated a mouse line unresponsive to THC. Next, they performed behavioral and functional testing. They found that CB1-/- mice, or mice that are physically incapable of being stimulated by THC, retained aversive memories forever. What I mean here is that they shocked normal, wildtype mice each time they sounded a high frequency alarm. The normal mice learned to associate the sound with pain, and thus they responded to the sound just as they did to the pain stimulus after they got used to the sound. Even when the painful stimulus was not applied, the mice responded as if it was. For about a week after the painful stimulus was stopped being administered along with the sound, the normal mice would respond to it just the same. Now for the really interesting part:

After about a week, these normal mice began to "forget" about the painful sound association, and they stopped responding negatively to the sound alarm without the pain stimulus. In other words, they were able to forget about the aversive relationship between the painful shock and the alarm sound that came with it initially. However, they did the same experiments on CB1 receptor null mice. These mice had no anandamide receptor activity, which as I stated is the endogenous ligand that activates the same receptors activated by THC from weed. So how did these mice respond to the learning experiment? Well, they too did not like the painful shock stimulus. They too did not like the alarm sound, as it reminded them of the shock even when the shock was withheld from the alarm sound. The difference? These mice NEVER forgot about the painful association with the alarm sound. Even after months, these mice still retained these aversive memories.

Discussion. So? What does that imply? Well, it has implications on memory for starters. Bad or good? Well, it's useful to know that the medical world actually used those mice studies as a basis for considering marijuana as an anti-traumatic experiences treatment. It's still being studied extensively now as an option. Imagine if we could help people to gain the ability to "forget" about aversive correlations and memories? This could immensely help war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. What about the bad? Well, there is a correlation with loss of short term memory ability too, as demonstrated by the data.

Where does this fit into what you said about weed "helping" you perform? Well, let's think about it. Now that we've elucidated a bit of what THC is actually DOING in your brain (there is still much we don't know...), let's see if we can define how it might be improving function. I'm curious as to what you come up with, because right now I can't come up with any ideas for how it might increase brain function or whatever. In fact, it seems that it might hamper your cognitive processes due to the CB1 effects!


Edit: Forgot to add. It would also be a useful study if one examined the effects of constitutively activating CB1 receptor activity. And that's exactly what researchers did after the CB1-/- mice experiments. Basically, they created mice that ALWAYS have their CB1 receptors activated. Remember, CB1 is the receptor at the brain that is activated by THC molecules from weed, or by endogenous anandamide ligand. What did they call these mice? The mice were dubbed "stoner mice". These mice were hilarious, and maybe later I'll try to find some of the research data including videos of how these "stoner mice" behaved. In short, a lot of observations were made regarding their various behavioral characteristics. None of these observations suggested any obvious increased ability to do anything. As a result, I would argue that your seemingly newfound and improved ability to do something while high on THC is not a direct result of what THC is doing to your brain. Rather, it's got to be because of something else. Maybe you think differently while high, and THAT is what improves whatever particular thing you are doing on some other level of cognition. However, that said, you still experience the delays and other "slightly negative" effects of weed as a result of CB1 activity alteration.