Punk planet dot com. Marijuana wreaks havoc on brain's memory cells. Smoking marijuana often causes temporary problems with memory and learning. Now researchers think they know why. The active ingredient in the drug, tetrahydrocannabinoid (THC), disrupts the way nerves fire in the brain's memory centre, a new study shows. David Robbe at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, and colleagues gave rats an injected dose of THC, proportional to the amount inhaled by a person smoking an average-sized marijuana joint. The team monitored the drug's effect using wire probes placed in a memory centre in the animals' brains - the hippocampus. The probes monitored the nerve impulses as they fired. Normally, cells in hippocampus fire in sync, creating a current with a total voltage of around 1 millivolt. But THC reduced the synchrony of the firing. Abnormal firing occurs because THC binds to a receptor on the surface of the nerve cell, and so indirectly blocks the flow of current, Robbe believes.
Encore! Normal rats accurately alternate their routes about 90% of the time. The SLEngineer Magazine. Virtual Worlds News. Archfarm. The KONSTRUKT. Zaha Hadid in artforum.