Marijuana

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Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:12pm PT

Hard to believe only 19 million are working the herb. Been over 25 years for me and I still feel a little spaced at times.

JL

jstan

climber

Topic Author's Reply - Apr 16, 2014 - 03:13pm PT

A-hah.

Brandon-

climber

The Granite State.

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:15pm PT

Kids shouldn't smoke or drink, everyone knows that.

Spanky

Social climber

boulder co

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:16pm PT

As is the case with most illegal drugs the grey area in the legal sense has meant that legitimate scientific research on these substances has been extremely limited. As Clint said this study tells us almost nothing in terms of how long term users brain function is altered just that their are some structural differences which may or may not have any affect on function. What we really need to determine the effects of marijuana are FDA style double blind studies that provide real stats. Until then all of these informal studies will continue to misinform the public.

julton

climber

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:23pm PT

Chocolate contains anandamide which binds to the same receptor in the brain as THC, for whatever that's worth.

The Larry

climber

Moab, UT

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:33pm PT

blahblah

Gym climber

Boulder

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:35pm PT

Hard to believe only 19 million are working the herb. Been over 25 years for me and I still feel a little spaced at times.

JL

Can't tell if this was meant to be sarcastic or a joke (in which case ignore my comment), but if it's "for real":
consider that people who never smoked herb, drank alcohol, or did anything else fun also have plenty of "senior moments" and the like.
It's human nature to try to find a cause for our problems, but that doesn't mean we're right.

It's probably impossible for any of us to take drugs/drink, wait 25 years, and then determine what may have been different if we didn't take drugs/drink.

anita514

Gym climber

Great White North

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:52pm PT

I'm dumb enough as it is... don't need anything else to add to it

Inner City

Trad climber

East Bay

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:54pm PT

Don't Criticize it!

The Larry

climber

Moab, UT

Apr 16, 2014 - 03:54pm PT

I just like bacon.

mechrist

Gym climber

South of Heaven

Apr 16, 2014 - 04:18pm PT

I started smoking A TON of weed in college... like once a day... just to see if I could get as stupid as all the people around me. It didn't work so I gave up and started drinking. That worked, but only for a few hours at a time.

I tried bacon once and knew I'd be hooked for life if I wasn't careful.

grover

climber

Northern Mexico

Apr 16, 2014 - 04:40pm PT

mmmmmm bacon.

nevahpopsoff

Boulder climber

the woods

Apr 16, 2014 - 04:50pm PT

considering the world as it is, this does not seem like a major problem.

NutAgain!

Trad climber

South Pasadena, CA

Apr 16, 2014 - 05:32pm PT

For most of you this will be long-winded babble. But for those of you in the searching phase, struggling to find the order in the chaos, I offer this as my personal experience.

Nutagain! What have you done to stop the chatter? Mine is building to a crescendo.

Here is one possible answer to the immediate question, with very little context or background. Imagine that your brain is divided up into two little kids arguing in the back seat of a car: the Intellect trying to get the other kid to do what they're supposed to do (what mommy and daddy told them?), and then there's the Emotional one that just wants to jump and shout when they're joyful, cry and sob when they're sad or scared, shout and shake their fists or break stuff when they're angry, etc. Now imagine the Emotional one doing something for fun, the Intellect one telling them they're going to get in trouble, the Emotional one getting pissed that the Intellect is trying to stop them, and ignoring it and doing something in retaliation to piss off the Intellect and get them both in more trouble, and the Intellect trying even harder to clamp down and get the Emotional one to stop.... maybe the Intellect alternates and tries different strategies like laying out a logical and rational reason for the Emotional one to behave a certain way... but when it doesn't work right away the Intellect falls back into being demanding and controlling; maybe there is bargaining involved, like "just do this for me and then I'll let you...." And then sometimes the Emotional one gets very scared or upset or otherwise can't cope with a situation, and the Intellect tries their best to cope with it, maybe by berating the Emotional one and saying "I told you so" or maybe by trying in a round-about way to console the Emotions by changing the subject, getting engaged in some distracting activity, fogging over and tuning out.... Well, the details of the dialogue change for different people's histories and issues and circumstances, but the back-and-forth squabbling, negotiating, justifications, ignoring, etc. all contribute to that mental chatter. Learning to create a deeper understanding between the different parts of one's Intellect and Emotional self, learning to understand and appreciate the contributions of each part to who we are, and learning to honor the needs of each part.... Well, this is the essence of stopping that mental chatter.

Everyone has their own issues and history and follows their own path. This is how mine went:

I committed to a highly dysfunctional marriage, where an emotionally healthy person would have RUN away almost immediately. Clear alarm bells within the first weeks of the relationship. It was sufficiently painful that over a period of years it became relatively less scary and painful to face my inner demons, childhood issues that contributed to my part of the difficult marriage.

I read self-help books, took a very analytic (but emotionally disconnected) approach to recognizing negative patterns in my marriage that I wanted to stop. We tried couples counseling. I tried personal counseling.

After years of "trying harder" and pre-thinking scenarios and how I should handle them, and utterly failing in the heat of the moment, I accepted that there was something else going on that I was not comprehending, something that overpowered and rendered useless my intellectual efforts to troubleshoot my relationship and behavioral problems

I enrolled myself in a weekly anger management class. In this class, they discussed the amygdala in our brain, and the idea of a "fight or flight" response, along with how we can make balancing thoughts that use our intellect to shift away from our perceptions that we are in danger. This gave me a concept to latch onto to explain what I had intuitively realized and observed but not been able to articulate.

In further self-help book reading, and exploring what triggered the "fight or flight" response for me, I became aware of a very scary "OH SH!T" reservoir of feelings inside of me that, upon just perceiving the edges of it I had a strong desire to run very far away from it. Pit in the stomach, lump in the throat, difficulty breathing, tears welling up, back away quickly oh sh!t I don't want to go there primal kind of stuff.

I accepted that my intellect wasn't going to solve this directly, that I needed to go in a different dimension (emotional) to diffuse the mental landmines, to operate on the level of my fight/flight triggers. I didn't know explicitly how to do that, but I had an inkling that it would be an experiential process, attempting to re-experience or directly access the emotional state at the time the "landmines" were laid in my brain and somehow re-etch those deeply burned in neural pathways. I knew I would be in an unthinkably vulnerable spot while dealing with this, and started looking around for some sort of a "retreat" or safe place to do this. I discovered some options akin to a "heal your inner child" thing, basically a week-long pajama party at a psychologists' house to dig into it all, and I was mentally preparing for that.

Meanwhile, my internet searches led me to an essay about the Hoffman Process that deeply resonated with me on intellectual and emotional levels:
http://www.hoffmanireland.com/articles/joan.htm

At that point, I was in pretty strong rebellion against anything spiritual, largely as a rebellion against my mother and her embracing 12-step programs and new-agey positive affirmations and stuff like that. But the other pieces were strong enough that for me, this became the Grand Unified Theory for understanding myself and others. Everything I read just rang true with my loosely coupled and intuitively cobbled together notions about these issues and how to address them:
https://www.hoffmaninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/PPFL-4Email.pdf

Well, I went to this retreat for 8 days. Before that, I probably spent about 40 hours on preparatory homework to get the most out of it, very methodically inventorying detailed personality traits and being as brutally honest as I was capable of being, and looking for patterns to where those traits came from in each of my parents and step-parents, whether I was doing the same things or opposite things. Think of it like this: we are born with certain potential and individuality. As we grow, we develop certain automated responses to handle situations in our childhood. These things make our childhood easier to cope with, but it screws up our ability to live an adult life, with different circumstances than our childhood, in an intentionally directed way.

Anyways, I was committed. Even so, I was still conflicted and fearful about this whole retreat, and I arrived 30 minutes late after staying up all night before. At some point I might write more about my personal journey during those 8 days and the time afterward... but that's for another time. For now, I can confidently say that committing to that experience was the best gift I ever gave myself, a major milestone in my life journey that transformed how I perceive and feel and think about many things.

Oh... original question... all of this long answer was providing a context or background for my path to stop the chatter in my head. There was a specific sequence of activities during that 8 day retreat where the voices came to a shocking and utterly complete stop, and I had a perma-grin on my face like you wouldn't believe. And in the absence of all that other head stuff, there was room to notice so much more of what was around me: smells, sights, sounds, every perceptual stimuli turned up to eleven. But not in a drunken Dumbo dream sort of way, or the Cream Disraeli Gears record cover sort of way, but in an honest rich reality sort of way, with a strong sense of being deeply connected to everything around me. The intensity of that original experience is something special in my memory, and maybe the dramatic difference from before and after made it more intense and unfamiliar. At this point, I can frequently lose touch with that feeling, and honestly it's not my daily normal mode of operation. I think that is mainly for my lack of continued development to explore why I choose not to live like that every day. I'm still afraid of facing something to peel that layer back.

But, I am in pretty solid command of the ability to switch into that mode of perception, of mental silence at most moments that I want to. I can decide to stop internal messages and just perceive what is coming in without explicit verbalized monologues or distracting trains of thought.

Over the years I have reigned in my effusiveness or enthusiasm about this program, trying to give people the space to follow their own path and find passion for whatever approach works for them. Going on 12 years now since I went, I think it's safe for me to extol it's virtues without having it seem like a brain-washy psycho-babble pyramid marketing recruitment scheme. It's for real, and has been profoundly useful to people of all ages, with all manner of traumatic histories or normal or good childhoods. Of course some people have more dramatic histories that their stories can be attached to, some people start from a more dysfunctional level than others so the changes seem more remarkable, but the core issues and fears and needs are something that unite all people.

Sanskara

climber

Apr 16, 2014 - 05:56pm PT

Good stuff nut!

Thanks for sharing..

It is a very freeing place to come to in life when you can just slow and shut off the voices, the chatter the Chitta vritti all on your own nothing needed but knowing how..

The Larry

climber

Moab, UT

Apr 16, 2014 - 06:17pm PT

Gud read, nutagain. I think. I forgot.

NutAgain!

Trad climber

South Pasadena, CA

Apr 16, 2014 - 07:45pm PT

Larry makes me LOL

I'm munching a bowl of Cheerios. Damn fine Cheerios. Actually they're Trader Joe's O's, but they're damn fine Cheerios.

I also made some wheat-free pancakes with rice flour, potato flour, flax, and stuff like that. They kinda suck. Pamela's brand wheat free pancake mix is where it's at.

Toker Villain

Big Wall climber

Toquerville, Utah

Apr 16, 2014 - 07:50pm PT

Much work is needed in this field.

Gimme a break. I'm only one man doing what I can!

It is pretty obvious that it makes you lazy and demotivated.
By not using I could have put up hundreds of classic routes.

Ah well,..

Jingy

climber

Somewhere out there

Apr 16, 2014 - 08:25pm PT

The scientists found that the more the marijuana users reported consuming, the greater the abnormalities in the nucleus accumbens and amygdala. The shape and density of both of these regions also differed between marijuana users and non-users.
"This study raises a strong challenge to the idea that casual marijuana use isn't associated with bad consequences," Breiter said.

Sorry.... not convinced that this study has anything to do with anything. So we've found that the brains of growing and semi-grown marijuana smokers show signs of changes.

Wether the "changes" are good or bad were not determined, right? Unless you are one of those who thinks that change of any kind of the brain is bad-bad-BAD no matter what is found to be fact later.

What if the changes the researchers have written about are the physical manifestation of that "opening new doors of perception" that many users have reported in the past.