Smoking cannabis improves night vision

You're not completely stoned if you think your vision improves after smoking. Scientists have figured out how cannabis can enhance night vision.

Back in 2004. A group of researchers observed that Moroccan fishermen traditionally smoke cannabis resin before setting out to sea at night. Fishermen claim that this allows them to see better in the darkness of the sea as they wait for their catch, and scientists confirm this. They conducted several vision tests to these people. The more they had smoked, the better they did.

The reason why cannabis improves night vision has not yet been determined. Cannabis often tends to dto have red eyes and can make the eyelids feel heavy in some varieties. However, a a new study published in August An article in the journal eLife offers some interesting insights into this phenomenon.

Edward Ruthazer, a professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, is the lead researcher on the study in question. He discovered that cannabinoids, the active ingredients in cannabis, increased the connection between the brain and the eye in tadpoles.

«We are a laboratory that studies the development of brain circuits. We use tadpoles because they are transparent. We can observe brain cells in a living specimen and watch them remodel over time and form connections,» he explains. «It is well known that cannabinoids are important for certain aspects of brain development. So we wanted to observe and record functional changes in connectivity when cannabinoids are introduced into the brain.”.

Although Ruthazer and his team had expected to see brain function decline, they were surprised to find that cannabis strengthens the connections between the eye and the brain, because cannabis «makes the eye more sensitive to visual stimuli.».

In other words, the cells in the eye are better able to respond to visual stimuli when exposed to cannabinoids. Ruthazer was able to determine that the introduction of cannabinoids activates a cannabinoid receptor in the brain (known as CB1R) which enhances the transmission of the signal from the eye to the brain when the eye is exposed to light. Increasing the tadpoles’ natural cannabinoid levels produced the same effect, whereas inhibiting the receptor blocked it completely.

Further research will be needed to confirm whether mammals react in the same way. But this is an important step toward understanding the’Interaction between cannabis and the brain. Previous studies have already shown that cannabis does not only have positive effects on the brain, especially when it comes to short-term memory. But as Professor Ruthazer says: «Cannabinoids are capable of regulating brain cell activity through a wide range of different mechanisms.» We will therefore need to distinguish the potential negative effects from the therapeutic effects in order to weigh the pros and cons.