A number of articles report scientific skepticism regarding Daniel Amen and SPECT imaging, including articles published by the Washington Post and WIRED magazine. [0] [1] [2]
Uh-oh, cannabis makes your brain age faster than alcohol? Stoner apologists won’t be happy about this... I predict a wave of anecdotal evidence and broscience along the lines of:
- “but it cured my depression”
- “nobody dies of cannabis overdose, but many people die from alcohol poisoning, checkmate!”
- “but it makes me sleep well, and sleeping is healthy”
- “it can cure cancer, but big pharma doesn’t want you to know”
I'm sure it sounds like a broken record at this point, but "correlation =/= causation". It is possible that many that abuse cannabis are also more likely to engage in other activities that could contribute to brain aging. Of course it does not mean there is not causation either, but nonetheless more research is needed to be able to say definitively that it contributes more to brain aging than alcohol. Also as others have pointed out, the researchers definition of "abuse" is not defined.
Edit: also would like to add that it is quite common for people with mental illness to self medicate with cannabis, there are enough variables here to make one want to pull their hair out
>I predict a wave of anecdotal evidence and broscience along the lines of: - “but it cured my depression”
How's that laughable?
If cannabis can indeed help with depression that might mean more for the quality of life for a person despite "making their brain age faster".
Besides this "faster brain aging" could still be at an insignificant amount.
As in anything, there are tradeoffs.
Besides, as with any study, including the "largest" ones, this should be taken with a grain of salt, until results are solidified and go from mere research to active recommendations and common medical practices.
Anecdotal: It didn't cure my depression but certainly helped me manage it. It was the only thing that made the depression subside for long enough to concentrate and get real work done.
Major Caveat: My brain chemistry has changed over time, and the last 10 times I've smoked have all been horrible, indescribable paranoia and anxiety I wouldn't wish upon anyone. (Fun fact: pure THC injected into a healthy adult predictably causes psychosis.)
Used to recommend highly, now highly dis-recommend until the genetic testing becomes available and widespread. For some people it's the only thing that helps. For others it might just be the worst thing a person could do to themselves.
Re: Correlation != Causation
Yes, certainly. However, observing myself and others, I see a definite worsening of anxiety and paranoia after smoking. Yes, it depends on the person, what you're smoking, etc. (THC vs CBD (apparently a potent anti-psychotic) is very fascinating and I look forward to more research in this area)
The take-home point is that there are people who should not be smoking at all, and this is something I really don't hear mentioned enough.
Speaking of broscience - that sure is a nice graphic they made, but the article they cited notes that they essentially defined brain aging themselves using their model and found it associated "alcohol use, cannabis use, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and in men"; but their pretty graphic leaves out being a man as a source of brain aging in their graphic for some reason.
People with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and ADHD usually take drugs that might influence "brain aging" — i.e. the disease itself might not be the culprit.
Article is light on details on what constitutes brain aging, but judging by 85 year old Willie Nelson's articulateness in his 2018 interviews, I hope to be aging my brain some day, as I get closer to retirement. Deep, gravelly, I don't give a fuck, voice. Zero hesitation, when he feels like expressing himself.
Article is light on a number of things, but I can illuminate some things...
Having worked in one of the largest centers that do this kind of work, the standard practice is to do regression models that predict the atrophy of different brain regions as a function of age. Several longevity studies have implicated grey matter densities in the anterior cingulate cortex as predictive of living for a long time.
Almost all of this prior work has been done with T1 imaging and DTI. SPECT is a new kid on the block, and has a lot of fans and detractors. It's use is somewhat controversial it seems. Someday I'll have time to dig deeper into the tech.
This correlates with low neuroticism scores, and is also a brain region that SSRIs improve grey matter volumes of over the long term.
You may be arguing from exception here. Yes, Willie Nelson is seemingly doing fine. But we don't know for sure how much he actually smokes. We have his claims.
But even giving him his self-reported claims, he is still a sample size of one.
Your mileage will vary.
Basically what you have done here is taken a piece of information, realized you don't like the results, and have found a way to rationalize continuing doing what you were doing anyway.
If you have ever complained about someone not believing in facts, not doing research, not trusting data, not trusting science, you have just put lie to your reasons for doing so. Because you are behaving just like them. Discarding information that makes you uncomfortable. And we can't do that.
Which makes an one-size-fits-all research less relevant as an absolute rule.
>If you have ever complained about someone not believing in facts, not doing research, not trusting data, not trusting science
Then you've done fine, as:
1) science is not some holy gospel given from god but a man-made endeavor (and prone to corruption, politics, error, careerism, and so on),
2) data can be manipulated or misread,
3) research can be bought, manipulated for grants, follow the wrong methodology, be unreproducible, and so on
4) facts themselves have no value unless you've seen them with your own eyes (and even then, you could be delusional or mistaken). With the term "fact" we denote something collected and reported by somebody that might be mistaken, told BS (e.g. how people self-report lies in studies and polls), distorted the actual bare facts for political reasons or private interests, and so on.
Not even peer review is some kind of holy process for the truth. All kinds of crap (even auto-generated) have passed peer review, academics prop each other up in little cliques all the time, tons of peer reviewed studies were found wrong and unreproducible, few "reviewers" take the time to reproduce or verify a study (to the point that studies quote the same old study for decades, and base their recommendations on it, and then it's found to be unsubstantiated BS), and meta-studies are more often than not very shallow.
If you trust science, you're not scientific and empirical enough.
Verify the crap out of everything you here, even if it's sold as "science".
And every "point" you've brought up is the same canard flat Earthers, young Earth creationists, and other sort of pseudo-science hack pushes.
asdf has discarded out of hand the study for the first reason he could find because he does not like the result. There are better reasons elsewhere in this very thread for being skeptical. But he didn't look those up. He didn't do one bit of leg work. He decided "Willie Nelson, Checkmate." What he's done is no better than what so many anti-intellectual hacks have done when arguing against things like evolution and the Earth not being flat.
So yes, I trust science, because I trust the process.
And it wasn't presented as a "one-size-fits-all" research. And regardless, if it was found that it was an average of 4 years, you're just saying "Yeah, well, I'm going to be one of the lucky ones".
The scientific process is an abstract idea. Unless you believe in the reality of platonic ideas, the real world offers a much messier application of the scientific process.
Besides, I've already covered that.
>And every "point" you've brought up is the same canard flat Earthers, young Earth creationists, and other sort of pseudo-science hack pushes.
Which is neither a scientific argument, nor a relevant one. The fact that people who have wrong opinions on another matter (e.g. whether the earth if flat) also put forward this argument regarding science, does not mean it is false. You simply committed a logical fallacy.
In fact, I'm not even sure those people put forward this argument in any case. Young Earth creationists, for example, put forward other kinds of arguments (e.g. that the Bible knows better, which is not the same as "real science is a messy human process, never trust what its practitioners say just because it's labelled as science").
>He decided "Willie Nelson, Checkmate."
Well, it's a good counter-example. At the very least, it proves (given what we know about Nelson is true) that the findings in the research are not an absolute truth but it can vary for each person. Heck, those researches should also study Nelson and other lucid older heavy users, and learn what they can from them as well.
Besides, asdf never professed to put up a scientific argument. He just made a casual comment in an online forum. Notice how everything he said is totally rational and empirically verifiable:
"Article is light on details on what constitutes brain aging, but judging by 85 year old Willie Nelson's articulateness in his 2018 interviews, I hope to be aging my brain some day, as I get closer to retirement. Deep, gravelly, I don't give a fuck, voice. Zero hesitation, when he feels like expressing himself."
He doesn't even say that the article is wrong "because Willie": just that Willie Nelson is very articulate despite being a heavy user, and that he hopes to be as "brain aged" as he is, when he gets close to retirement.
>So yes, I trust science, because I trust the process.
Too bad. There's no pure process in the world. There are just people who are supposed to follow a process, and you need to not just trust the process, but also to trust the people that they will follow it properly.
(In fact even the concept of such a "process" is mumbo jumbo: there's no single well specified "scientific process", with a predetermined set of rules that every practitioner follows or is supposed to follow. It's an umbrella term referring to all kinds of practices, described in several different abstract ways by philosophers of science based on a set of high level steps). Even "peer review" is a relatively recent phenomenon, as is "publish or perish").
The point "Sometime science is incomplete" doesn't say anything to any particular study. It doesn't address anything about the study itself. Saying "the data is wrong here" or "your statistical model is wrong in these ways" or "your sample size is too small" are tangible things and things worth bringing up. Saying "yeah, but science is wrong... sometimes" says nothing.
No one said the findings were absolute truth. It's a pointless thing to argue against. They said they found on average about 4 years of accelerated aging. You get averages from highs and lows. So a counter-example of one is irrelevant. Ok, put him in with the averages. Now the average is... about 4 years. His data point doesn't move the needle.
Sure the article is light on details, because it's a summary of a study. Not the study itself. But the point remains, he latched on to the first thing he could think of to dismiss the results. That's just bad process.
And I never said it has to be a "pure" process. If the only way you have of "making a point" is to stretch others' words to the point of absurdity, then you don't have a point. You are immediately assuming the worst possible interpretation of words rather than even a neutral one. The process is overall simple: perform, observe, record, interpret. If your findings are valid, if your methods are sound, and your tests repeatable, others will be able to duplicate your results. And I'm sure you're going to interpret that in the worst possible way. Because you have already an answer you want, you just need to fit the data to it.
Being skeptical, being open, also means being wrong sometimes. The idea is to consider new information and not just toss it aside because it conflicts with your personal preferences.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2008/05/mf-neurohacks/?currentPage=all
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/daniel-ame...
[2] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dr-amens-love-affair-with-s...