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Cannabis and the deprivation-training of cognition

Mjäll

Mjäll

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Jun 25, 2008
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Elite sportsmen sometimes expose themselves to low-oxygen high-altitude air in order to stress respiration and provoke a compensatory response from the body. Strength trainers also restrict bloodflow to target muscles in order to increase the stress and produce a greater training stimulus, thus provoking a greater hypertrophy response.

My thinking is that cannabis could do this for learning. Trying to learn while high could provoke a greater learning effort, because the drug effect suppresses short-term memory.

Thoughts?

tl;dr: Get dumb to get smart!
 
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I wouldn't try it in high school at least could screw up development can't really tell college kids what they can put in their bodies
 
Just going to throw this in here that it appears that CBD helps somewhat to prevent the short memory problems associated with THC use. From personal experience however, it does not give one back their memory if they have abused the shit out of other drugs and ran their brain in for many miles previously
 
I don't think that's how the mind works. It's not a tear and repair process .. more of a repittion. I have a massively atypical memory and exams are a nightmare for me and I rmember at the end of my revision for my degree I could memorise a page of strange shit and understand it's essnece in about 30 seconds. I went clubbing most weekends and wrecked myself with sped / pills. The weed was for the come downs. I also spent about 6 hours a day just memorising for about 3 months.

My sister has an almost perfect memory and unlike me cruised right through school to a first at cambridge without ever revising. I had to fight like hell to get the equivalent.

School is crap - too much memorising. That said .. you really need the piece of paper that says you know things or it seriously limits your life options.
 
relentlessgenjin said:
I wouldn't try it in high school at least could screw up development can't really tell college kids what they can put in their bodies
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I was thinking more for adult use. Cannabis seems a bit risky for adolescents.

To be frank, i was mainly thinking of creative learning pursuits such as music.

Darksidesam said:
Just going to throw this in here that it appears that CBD helps somewhat to prevent the short memory problems associated with THC use. From personal experience however, it does not give one back their memory if they have abused the shit out of other drugs and ran their brain in for many miles previously
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Thank you for this input.

kinkyjohn said:
I don't think that's how the mind works. It's not a tear and repair process .. more of a repittion. I have a massively atypical memory and exams are a nightmare for me and I rmember at the end of my revision for my degree I could memorise a page of strange shit and understand it's essnece in about 30 seconds. I went clubbing most weekends and wrecked myself with sped / pills. The weed was for the come downs. I also spent about 6 hours a day just memorising for about 3 months.

My sister has an almost perfect memory and unlike me cruised right through school to a first at cambridge without ever revising. I had to fight like hell to get the equivalent.

School is crap - too much memorising. That said .. you really need the piece of paper that says you know things or it seriously limits your life options.
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I see parallells between training the mind and training athletic functions. Both processes involve exposing oneself to a challenge, a disruption of homeostasis. If circumstances were naïvely optimal, no-one would ever have to learn anything, lift anything or even move at all. Neurons may not be torn and repaired like muscle tissue, but the principle could be similar. Trying to learn a difficult cognitive skill will be made even more difficult by impairing memory. This could make the mental training more effective. If you succeed in a task while high, maybe you are even better sober.

I'm not saying this is true but exploring the subject.

I appreciate your input and anecdote.
 
Logically one would ask: Why not another impairing substance like a GABAr agonist?

An intuition tells me that cannabis more effectively disrupts memory without interfering with other relevant aspects of cognition, or with coordination. It also brings a certain expansion of imagination, perhaps precisely at the cost of memory and central executive function. This could be a double whammy effect on creative learning.

I never can tell personally if cannabis enhances my creativity, but the idea fascinates me at least enough to make a thread about it.
 
short term memory can better be looked at as the increased reactivation potential for recently active cortical neurons
this means, in a normal case that your experience context of the last 5 minutes can be used to bolster new memory formation, to help interconnect what you have recently been studying, and summarizing.
any similarities (they do not have to be strong similarities), between what you recently considered and what you are cramming in at the moment, will suffice to fix the pattern into the memory thicket.
with psychedelics and cannabis, experiences resonate longer, overlap, and produce layered artifacts.
this means that the short term memory can become full of (stoned) mental state dependent stuff, when it is cross-linked into new memory formation.

short term memory is still functioning, but it has become strange: the new memories can be recalled mostly when and if equally stoned and in a similar setting, or, in recalling the memories, you can get flashbacks as well. Often when getting off, you can remember how it felt before, in ways that were inaccessible while not stoned.

for this reason stimulants are more effective for studying, but you need to have a good handle on your dosage and recovery schedule, energy levels, and exam schedule.
 
Mjäll said:
I see parallells between training the mind and training athletic functions. Both processes involve exposing oneself to a challenge, a disruption of homeostasis. If circumstances were naïvely optimal, no-one would ever have to learn anything, lift anything or even move at all. Neurons may not be torn and repaired like muscle tissue, but the principle could be similar. Trying to learn a difficult cognitive skill will be made even more difficult by impairing memory. This could make the mental training more effective. If you succeed in a task while high, maybe you are even better sober.

I'm not saying this is true but exploring the subject.

I appreciate your input and anecdote.
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Actually .. now you mention this .. I do remember reading papers on receptor expression that do sound a lot like the classic tear and repair approach .. at least in association. Of course the mind is more complex than simple neurons and at the larger scale it appears less to be like tear and repair .. but the underlying process is generally unimportant ... if you want to learn or get stronger / faster .. repetition is the key.

I guess repetition looked at a smaller scale is always going to look like tear and repair .. systems waiting in a state most suited to experience until a new experience tears them a new one and gives them a new optimal state.

But then god is dead .. it's all scale and entropy .. and I stopped believing in stupid shit like dimensions about half way through my PhD ... Time ... phew .. that's just entropy in a finite universe.

And after a brief stop to make enough money to pay for it (surrounded by lunatics) that's when I became a really really serious junky.
 
that makes too much sense, why not go for crazy, fall in love, raise a family, go broke, get old then become a serious junky.
 
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