Posts tagged: neurology
Is Heavy Marijuana Use Harmful?
A new study by Australian researchers into the effects of heavy Marijuana use have returned some interesting results. Heavy users showed reduced size in specific areas of the brain as well as earned lower scores than the nonusers in a verbal memorization test.
Brain scans showed the hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in men who were heavy marijuana users compared to nonusers, the researchers said. The men had smoked at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for on average 20 years.
Now, I’m a bit biased in this debate, but isn’t that a bit too heavy? 5 joints daily for 20 years? Marijuana Policy Project spokesman Bruce Mirken seems to agree with me saying, “These were people who were essentially stoned all day every day for 20 years … This study says nothing about moderate or occasional users, who are the vast majority — and the (study) even acknowledges this.” Mirken follows with, “The documented damage caused by comparably heavy use of alcohol or tobacco is just off-the-charts more serious, and you don’t need high-tech scans to find it.”
It is a bit excessive a study group. Even most ‘daily’ users I’ve met never hit the 5 joint mark every day. I think a more moderate-use study would be more informative overall as well as a more controlled experiment to weed out other possible causes. In the end though, the researchers had and have the best of intentions saying, “With nearly 15 million Americans using cannabis in a given month, 3.4 million using cannabis daily for 12 months or more and 2.1 million commencing use every year, there is a clear need to conduct robust investigations.” With that, I whole heartedly agree. More research is definitely needed. And I, for one, will be doing my part.
Via: Reuters
Brain Implants Are Here… And They Work
We’ve read about them for years in science fiction. They’ve been testing them for decades. Some people can’t wait to get their hands on them while others are afraid they could be used for malicious purposes. Brain Implants are small devices that stimulate areas of the brain that don’t quite work right on their own. Mostly due to the short lengths of the studies, reports have so far been hazy regarding their overall effectiveness until now. A long-range study being presented at the upcoming American Association of Neurological Surgeons meeting demonstrates how, over a 10-year period, patients aided by brain implants increasingly regained control over their moods and obsessive behaviors.
The data we are presenting on 43 patients is the result of more than 10 years of work across multiple institutions worldwide. These data represent the largest number and the longest evaluation of patients with psychiatric disorders who have undergone DBS implants, including some with long-term follow up,” said Dr. Rezai, who represented an international working group of physicians studying DBS therapy for treatment resistant OCD and depression.
To me, the scariest possibility with brain implants is security. As the technology proliferates, it’ll only be a matter of time until they become connectivity devices. Once they’re open to a network, the threat of malicious compromise becomes very real. How long does a device need to be connected to the internet before someone learns how to break in and use it for their own nefarious purposes? I could imagine some form of hierarchy of low-level to high-level where some implants are allowed connectivity with the outside and each other whereas others are hard-wired and dedicated to one task. Then we have the Black Market or the use of implants as drug relaying devices.
Regardless of the social implications, it’s still cool to know the technology is picking up and looking good.
Via: io9
Is Positive Thinking Really The Key To Success?
I’m pretty interested in the whole Self-Help phenomenon in general so when I read this article, my eyebrow jerked a bit. The article reveals that…
… performance failures cannot always be attributed simply to inherent lack of ability or incompetence.
… the roots of many handicaps actually lie in the stereotypes, or preconceptions, that others hold about the groups to which we belong. For instance, a woman who knows that women as a group are believed to do worse than men in math will, indeed, tend to perform less well on math tests as a result.
So some of life’s little setbacks may actually be due to the way others see us, or how we think other see us as individuals and the groups to which we belong. How do you get yourself to think beyond stereotypes? Thinking positively. Oh, the Self-Help gurus will surely jump all over this one.
Positive thinking is the pinnacle of the Self-Help industry. Everyone from Dale Carnegie to Tony Robbins has promoted some form of positive thinking under some label or another. The problem with most of these Self-Help approaches is they tend to treat positive thinking as a panacea instead of an individual part of the way we think.
I could be called an advocate of positive thinking. I believe it’s an important part of dealing with many of life’s problems. I don’t believe it’s a cure-all though. No level of positive thinking will actually change my circumstances. Positively thinking of ways to change my circumstances may however.
Via: Scientific American
Tip-Of-The-Tongue Moments Explained
Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences are common and become more frequent in old age. But what causes them? Deborah Burke of Pomona College and her team found that when we don’t use words often enough, our brain’s associations with that word become weakened. Tip-of-the-tongue moments became more frequent as the gray matter in the area called the left insula, an area of the brain that has been implicated in sound processing and production, declined.
Words aren’t stored as a unit,” Burke says. “Instead you have the sound information connected to semantic information, connected to grammatical information, and so on. But the sounds are much more vulnerable to decay over time than other kinds of information, and that leads to the TOT experience.”
