Cannabis Increases Propensity for False Memories
Archive May 2020Notebook
Virtual reality experiments reveal that the popular drug may make the brain more open to misremembering.
Amy Schleunes
May 1, 2020
When Lilian Kloft stumbled across a 2015 study showing a connection between cannabis use and susceptibility to false memories, she found herself wondering about the legal implications of the results. The study had discovered that heavy users of cannabis were more likely than controls to form false memories—recollections of events that never occurred, for example, or warped memories of events that did—even when they were not at the moment “high.”
This kind of false remembering can pose difficulties for people gathering reliable testimony in the event of a crime, says Kloft, a PhD student in psychopharmacology and forensic psychology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Consequently, the growing acceptance of cannabis worldwide raises questions not only about how the drug affects memory, but also about how law enforcement officials should conduct interviews with suspects, victims, and witnesses who may be under the influence or regular users of the drug.
In order to further investigate the connection between cannabis and false memory formation, Kloft and collaborators recruited 64 volunteers for a series of experiments. Participants, who were occasional cannabis users, were given a vaporizer containing either cannabis or a hemp placebo and then told to inhale deeply and hold their breath for 10 seconds. After that, the researchers tested them in three different tasks designed to induce false memories.
In the first task, the team asked the volunteers to memorize lists of words, and then to pick out those words from test lists that also included dummy words. As expected, both the sober and the intoxicated participants falsely remembered some of the dummy words. But while the sober participants mostly falsely remembered words that were strongly associated with words on the original lists, the intoxicated participants also selected less-related and completely unrelated terms.
More:
https://www.the-scientist.com/notebook/cannabis-increases-propensity-for-false-memories-67473?utm_campaign=TS_DAILY%20NEWSLETTER_2020&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=87631437&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--yP3iPNo8fotviqyajAGRCmw4di8u0xzOhZ5Rk16AUjdl9qMb76EiDjexEbUJ_gOBweKYVDNSjYte28fadVrRdNwZX8g&_hsmi=87631437
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