Cannabis makes people more susceptible to false … – News SIN – National Information Services

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INTERNATIONAL WRITING -. It is known that cannabis causes memory problems. Now, a Spanish study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry shows that consumers of this substance have a higher propensity to experience false memories. Thus, chronic users of this substance showed more difficulties than the general population to retain new information and retrieve memories stored in memory.

The memory is a process malleable that builds gradually and is therefore susceptible to distortion or false memories. These ‘mistakes’ of memory is more frequently observed in various neurological and psychiatric disorders, but also in the healthy population, especially with increasing age. “A common phenomenon is having false memories of situations experienced in childhood and that we remember that the people around us have told us many times,” say the authors.

This is the research group Human Neuropsychopharmacology Institute for Biomedical Research Hospital de Sant Pau, with researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​in collaboration with the group of Cognition and Brain Plasticity Institute of Biomedical Research of Bellvitge.

research a task in which he was, to a group of chronic cannabis users and a group of healthy controls, a series of words to be learned was used. Past few minutes resubmitted the original words with new words and new unrelated semantically related words, and asked all participants to indicate which words belonged to the original list.

Consumers cannabis thought they had seen before semantically related words more often than the control group. Using the technique of magnetic resonance imaging, scientists discovered that cannabis users showed less activation in brain areas associated with processing of memories and the general control of cognitive resources.

The study found these memory deficits even though the participants had abandoned cannabis one month before conducting the test. Despite the consumption since the last time the activation of the hippocampus, a key structure linked to the storage of memories, was less the greater was the use of cannabis over the life of the participant.

These results demonstrate that cannabis users are more vulnerable to suffer distortions of memory even weeks after cessation of consumption. This suggests that prolonged impairment of the brain mechanisms that allow us to distinguish between real and illusory events occurs

Source:. 20minutos.es