Despite popular believes, tobacco does not seen to improve memory performance. Although some researchers argue that Short Term Memory can be increased with the use of nicotine, they did not experiment on non-smokers so a difference can be establish. Therefore, it is difficult to assess if nicotine really enhance memory-scanning.
Another study on memory and nicotine was made using a PET scan. This experiment showed that nonsmokers who were given nicotine before a specific test were actually doing better on that test than ex-smokers. However, the weak results of this study confirmed that the correlation between tobacco and memory was too unclear to be declared reliable. The lack of nicotine effect in ex-smokers could be explained by tolerance. Overall, we might be tempted to say that tobacco was the cause of memory improvement in all these experiments, but the results are so unclear that nobody is willing to claim this statement as true.
In contrast, we cannot prove that smoking decrease memory activity. So far, no studies were able to demonstrate that smokers have more difficulties in doing a memory task compared to non-smokers. Indeed, researchers are now trying to prove that a chronic use of tobacco can have a negative effect on memory performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment