How marijuana impairs working memory

April, 2012

A mouse study indicates that the psychoactive component of marijuana, TCP, impairs working memory by initiating a process that ends with neural connections being weakened.

A new study explains how marijuana impairs working memory. The component THC removes AMPA receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate in the hippocampus. This means that there are fewer receivers for the information crossing between neurons.

The research is also significant because it adds to the growing evidence for the role of astrocytes in neural transmission of information.

This is shown by the finding that genetically-engineered mice who lack type-1 cannabinoid receptors in their astroglia do not show impaired working memory when exposed to THC, while those who instead lacked the receptors in their neurons do. The activation of the cannabinoid receptor expressed by astroglia sends a signal to the neurons to begin the process that removes AMPA receptors, leading to long-term depression (a type of synaptic plasticity that weakens, rather than strengthens, neural connections).

See the Guardian and Scientific American articles for more detail on the study and the processes involved.

For more on the effects of marijuana on memory

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Related News

Chronic use of alcohol and marijuana during youth has been associated with poorer neural and cognitive function, which appears to continue into adulthood.

A large long-running New Zealand study has found that people who started using cannabis in adolescence and continued to use it for years afterward showed a significant decline in IQ from age 13 to 38. This was true even in those who hadn’t smoked marijuana for some years.

Research into the effects of cannabis on cognition has produced inconsistent results. Much may depend on extent of usage, timing, and perhaps (this is speculation) genetic differences.

A study involving 50 people with MS (aged 18-65), of whom half used marijuana for pain relief, has found that marijuana users performed significantly worse on tests of attention, speed of thinking, executive function and visual perception of spatial relationships between objects.

A study involving 48 adolescents, of whom 19 had been diagnosed with substance abuse/dependence, and 14 had a family history of substance abuse but no history of personal use, has found that greater alcohol use was associated with a significant decrease in attention and executive function (which

A study involving 134 cannabis users aged 16-23 has found that when they were smoking cannabis containing a low percentage of cannabidiol they performed much worse on the memory tests.

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