This Week In Brain News

While reading this week’s health news, we’ve singled out three brain-related articles to feature here:

Bad breath now, bad brain later?

Researchers found links between oral microbiome populations, and changes in brain function with aging. The short version is indeed “bad breath now = bad brain later”, but more specifically:

• People who had large numbers of the bacteria groups Neisseria and Haemophilus had better memory, attention and ability to do complex tasks
• People who had higher levels of Porphyromonas had more memory problems later
• People with a lot of Prevotella tended to predict poorer brain health and was more common in people who carry the Alzheimer’s Disease risk gene, APOE4.

If you’ve never heard of half of those, don’t worry: mostly your oral microbiome can take care of itself, provide you consistently do the things that create a “good” oral microbiome. So, see our “related” link below:

Read in full: Mouth bacteria may hold insight into your future brain function

Related: Improve Your Oral Microbiome

Weeding out a major cause of cognitive decline

Cannabis may be great for relaxation, but regular use is not great for mental sharpness, and recent use (even if not regular, and even if currently sober) shows a similar dip in cognitive abilities, especially working memory. In other words, cannabis use for relaxation should be at most an occasional thing, rather than an everyday thing.

While the results of the study are probably not shocking, something that we found interesting was their classification system:

❝Heavy users are considered young adults who’ve used cannabis more than 1000 times over their lifetime. Whereas, using 10 to 999 times was considered a moderate user, and fewer than 10 times was considered a non-user.❞

Which—while being descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature—suggests that, to be on the healthy end of the bell curve, an occasional cannabis-user might want to consider “if you have 999 uses before you hit the “heavy user” category, project those 999 uses against your life expectancy, and moderate your use accordingly”. In other words, a person just now starting use, who expects to live another 40 years, would calculate: 999/40 = 24.9 uses per year, so call it 2 per month. A person who only expects to live another 20 years, would do the same math and arrive at 4 per month.

Disclaimer: the above is intended as an interesting reframe, and a way of looking at long-term cannabis use while being mindful of the risks. It is not intended as advice. This health-conscious writer personally has no intention of using at all, unless perhaps in some bad future scenario in which I have bad chronic pain, I might consider that pain relief effects may be worth the downsides. Or I might not; I hope not to be in the situation to find out!

Read in full: Largest study ever done on cannabis and brain function finds impact on working memory

Related: Cannabis Myths vs Reality

Mind-reading technology improves again

We’ve come quite a way from simple 1/0 reads, and basic cursor control! Now, researchers have created a brain decode that can translate a person’s thoughts into continuous text, without requiring the person to focus on words—in other words, it verbalizes the ideas directly. Most recently, the latest upgrade means that while previously, the device had to be trained on an individual brain for many hours, now the training/calibration process takes only an hour:

Read in full: Improved brain decoder holds promise for communication in people with aphasia

Related: Are Brain Chips Safe?

Take care!