How Eternal Mental Youth Relates To Hash

Near as I can tell, smoking a bunch isn’t going to keep you sharp forever, but a new study published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on dementia and metal longevity singles out the so-called “bodyguard for the brain,” the receptor that keeps your brain from going to mush. Turns out it’s the cannabinoid-1 receptor.

Yeah, that’s the receptor in the brain that binds to THC and gets you high. The research involves mice, who are a lot like people in important ways, and turning this certain receptor on and off. “If we switch off the receptor using gene technology, mouse brains age much faster,” says Önder Albayram, the study’s main author. “This means that the CB1 signal system has a protective effect for nerve cells.” The study shows that, without the weed receptor, mouse brains actually lose cells.

Of course, I don’t want to trivialize the research by harping on the weed thing (but it’s interesting, right?). “The root cause of aging is one of the secrets of life,” Albayram adds. One of the big contributing things in the mental downward spiral is inflammation and, somehow, these receptors guard against that. Understanding how it does that is a potential key to creating therapies to, well, keep your brain from dying.

Connections:

• Whoa, a Computer with Schizophrenia
• A Plague of Senior Moments O’er the Digital Land
• Augmented Cognition Is A Getting-Things-Done Guru For Your Brain

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.