Bad Reporting, Not Email, Worse Than Marijuana

MoNickels writes "Turns out, those endless news reports and blog entries in April about "texting makes you stupid" were inaccurate. As linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog now reports by way of apologizing to Wilson, it wasn't Wilson's fault, but that of "rotten science journalism." Psychologist Glenn Wilson was reported to have done a study said that chat and email, as the Guardian put it, "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis." But Wilson says, "This...is a temporary distraction effect—not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 [subjects] somehow became '80 clinical trials.'" The original Slashdot story was covered back in April."

Comments

Carl Sagan Smoked Pot

[Anonymous Coward]

From Wiki "Carl Sagan was an avid user of marijuana, although he never publicly admitted it during his life. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X," he wrote an essay concerning cannabis smoking in the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered, whose editor was Lester Grinspoon. In the essay, Sagan commented that marijuana encouraged some of his works and enhanced experiences. After Sagan's death, Grinspoon disclosed this to Sagan's biographer, Keay Davidson. When the biography, entitled Carl Sagan: A Life, was published in 1999, the marijuana exposure stirred some media attention."

Billions and billions of stars... whoa man far out.

Re:really that bad?

[jkauzlar]

I'd heard this about Carl Sagan and just looked it up in Wikipedia:

Carl Sagan was an avid user of marijuana, although he never publicly admitted it during his life[4]. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X," he wrote an essay concerning cannabis smoking in the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered, whose editor was Lester Grinspoon. In the essay, Sagan commented that marijuana encouraged some of his works and enhanced experiences. After Sagan's death, Grinspoon disclosed this to Sagan's biographer, Keay Davidson. When the biography, entitled Carl Sagan: A Life, was published in 1999, the marijuana exposure stirred some media attention.

I remember in college having roommates who would do just about everything, including homework, while stoned. Personally, I could never remember the details of a movie I'd watched while stoned, so I can't imagine it could be good for schoolwork. Most of the potheads I knew never made it far, and some are doing really great, but Carl Sagan and scores of successful writers (like the entire beat generation from the 50's & 60's) have shown that pot doesn't have to make you stupid if you're motivated to begin with.

If you ever listen to Dr. Drew on radio loveline you know they can tell a pothead, even if he isn't stoned, from the initial drawl of their 'hello.' The apparent IQ effect on potheads probably has a lot to do on the kind of people smoking it and where their priorities lie.

State dependence

[wytcld]

It's well-known through research that memory is best for things which you experienced when in a similar state. So you remember sad things better when you're sad, happy when you're happy, stoned when you're stoned, straight when you're straight, tired when you're tired, and so on. This makes biological sense: You're most likely to have use for the lessons of a part of the past when you're next in a most similar situation.

It's also part of how we are able to key our personalities for different functions: That morning cup of coffee; the happy hour drink after work.

This is a separate effect from that which can be occassioned by heavy drinking or (perhaps) really heavy pot smoking, where the circuits for laying down long-term memory appear to be interrupted so that even going back to a similar state won't retrieve the memories. But it's a confounding factor in reports about pot. Someone who's normally a bit depressed, but becomes happy when stoned, will remember things from the time when stoned just fine -- when they're stoned again. However, in their accustomed depressive state, not so much.