Regular pot smokers have shrunken brains, study says

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Regular pot smokers have shrunken brains, study says


© Jason Redmond/Reuters A participant practices rolling a joint at the Cannabis Carnivalus 4/20 event in Seattle, Washington April 20, 2014. Thousands of marijuana enthusiasts gathered in Colorado and Washington State over the weekend for an…

Experimental mice have been telling us this for years, but pot-smoking humans didn't want to believe it could happen to them: Compared with a person who never smoked marijuana, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less gray matter in his orbital frontal cortex, a region that is a key node in the brain's reward, motivation, decision-making and addictive behaviors network.

More ambiguously, in regular pot smokers, that region is better connected than it is in non-users:The flow of signal traffic is speedier to other parts of that motivation and decision-making network, including across the superhighway of "white matter" that connects the brain's hemispheres.

The researchers who conducted the study speculate that the orbital frontal cortex's greater level of "connectedness" — which is especially pronounced in people who started smoking pot early in life — may be the brain's way of compensating for the region's underperforming gray matter. Whether these "complex neuroadaptive processes" reverse themselves when marijuana use stops is an important unanswered question, they added.

The new findings, reported Monday in the journal PNAS, confirm findings about chronic marijuana use from rodents. But scientific evidence in humans has been more mixed.

MSN

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Nov 11, 2014 15:11:24 GMT -5 billisonboard said:

Bigger is better? Or is faster? 

Why your defending and its not necessary? Study didn't say better or worse only it said smaller. Also it said

Even now, however, the authors of the study acknowledge that they cannot discern whether a pot smoker's smaller orbital frontal cortex is the cause or the result of chronic marijuana use.

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You better ask who wrote it

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Researchers noted that the IQ of the marijuana-using group was significantly lower than that of the non-using group — not a finding of the study, but an incidental factor that might be indirectly linked to marijuana use.

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Compared with a person who never smoked marijuana, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less gray matter in his orbital frontal cortex, a region that is a key node in the brain's reward, motivation, decision-making and addictive behaviors network.

OK its all I'm gonna reply you except you READ it.

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o  Brain of who does not smoke regular pot

o Brain of who does smoke regular pot


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