(classical orchestra music)
(chalkboard writing)
(beep)
- Hey there, and welcome to Brain Stuff.
I'm Josh Clark, and
this is the Brain Stuff
where I explain to you
why you can't remember
anything when you smoke pot.
So marijuana is the most used illicit drug
in the United States, and
possibly even the world.
And stoners have kind of this reputation
of being forgetful or absent-minded,
saying things like, "What
were we just talking about?"
Things like that, right?
But there's actually
some truth, some reason,
some kernel of fact
behind this stereotype.
And it has to do with the
active ingredient found in pot,
tetrahydrocannabinol 9,
or THC to make it easy on me.
So no matter how you ingest pot,
whether you eat it, smoke
it, snort it, shoot it,
drop it, whatever, however
it enters your bloodstream,
it enters the brain by
latching on to something called
the cannabinoid receptor 1 protein,
or again, CB1, for short,
to make it easy on me.
And CB1 receptors are located
throughout your brain, all over the place,
in the cortex, the amygdala,
and most importantly,
as far as this Brain Stuff
episode is concerned,
in the hippocampus, where
memories are formed.
So, when CB1 proteins go
to enter their receptors
in the hippocampus, to say, form memories
as part of your natural
endocannabinoid system,
if it has a little THC stuck to it,
it's not going to form memories properly.
In fact, you might not
form memories at all,
while you're stoned.
Which is why, even after you
are not stoned any longer,
you can't really remember
what you were doing,
or talking about, or thinking
about when you were stoned,
unless you wrote it down.
And even then, it might
not make sense to you,
when you go back and read it.
All because your CB1 proteins
have some THC attached to 'em.
And it's messing up your memory formation.
However, despite what
your friend Alex says,
pot does not affect existing memories.
So, it's not going to lead
to memory loss or dementia,
and you'll be able to recall things
you already know, like your name.
Simple enough, right? Well, it turns out,
there's actually long-term memory effects,
depending on when you smoke pot.
A 2015 study in the journal Hippocampus,
which is a little on the nose,
as far as journal titles
go, if you ask me,
found that teenagers
who smoke pot regularly
for three years actually
can have long-term
memory troubles as well.
And the researchers linked it
to abnormally-shaped hippocampuses.
The teenagers in the study's hippocampus
looked like this, when really
a healthy hippocampus is
supposed to look like this.
However, it must be said
that studies of teenagers smoking pot,
and their long-term memory problems,
or any kind of memory problems,
has to be taken with a grain of salt
because very frequently,
the study populations
do other drugs too,
like sniffing glue and stuff like that.
The good news is, is
that if you didn't start
smoking pot as a teenager, and
just took it up as an adult,
your brain's already gonna be developed,
and pot's not going to
go in and disrupt your
hippocampus development,
cuz it's already there.
You're just gonna experience the weird
short-term memory loss, that kinda thing.
So, it seems that really, the big issue,
as far as pot and memory goes,
is when you smoke it while
you're an adolescent.
Cuz you end up with a
horrid, misshapen hippocampus
that can't remember anything at all.
And was it worth it?
If you like this video, that's awesome.
Can you remember anything I just said?
If so, leave it word-for-word
in the comments below.
And while you're down there,
go ahead and subscribe to Brain Stuff,
cuz there's plenty more stuff like this.
And, if you like all
sorts of awesome things,
just a wide variety, a
smorgasbord of neat stuff,
go on over to howstuffworks.com.
