Researchers: “Lazy Stoner” Stereotype NOT Supported by Evidence

“Lazy stoner” NO MORE!

UK Researchers Find Cannabis Abstainers LESS Motivated Than Cannabis Consumers

—>This is NOT A JOKE!<—

Ms Martine Skumlien is a PhD student in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her research centers around the impact of regular cannabis use on brain and cognition, with a particular emphasis on use in adolescence, in which she utilizes behavioral data along with fMRI in her work.

Ms. Martine Skumlien, MRes, is a researcher affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK -and- Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, Clinical Educational and Health Psychology Department, University College London, London, UK, and was lead researcher of a team of 16 that recently published their findings in the 14 August 2022 edition of the peer-reviewed International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology.

In the research entitled “Anhedonia, apathy, pleasure, and effort-based decision-making in adult and adolescent cannabis users and controls,” [also at: International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, pyac056, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijnp/pyac056] the results showed that non-cannabis users “had higher levels of anhedonia than cannabis users.” Anhedonia is the clinical term referring to the inability to feel or experience pleasure.

In their conclusion, the researchers wrote, “Our results suggest that cannabis use at a frequency of three to four days per week is not associated with

Is it true that God made Dogs, and that Satan made Cats?

Cat lovers… may the Almighty help you.

You’re gonna’ need it.

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

By Kathleen McAuliffe

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.

Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that