Dr. Matthew Hill

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614 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard Jul 2024

Dr. Matthew Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Huberman Lab · How Cannabis Impacts Health & the Potential Risks | Dr. Matthew Hill · 8 Jul 2024 podcast

energy detecting its periphery and saying, oh, you know, we might be burning through our energy reserves. We should probably eat more. And so there are obviously a few mechanisms that do this. NPY is another one and ghrelin and things like that. So there's a lot of redundancy in these systems, but endocannabinoids are just one of the molecules that seem to fine tune like the feeding circuitry.

And so in states of fasting, endocannabinoids go up explicitly in that circuit. And there's some evidence they also go up in like the nucleus accumbens and affect some of the reward circuitry. So they're probably... driving food-seeking behavior and enhancing the rewarding aspects of food at the same time.

And so that's like a natural endogenous mechanism to regulate feeding based on nutritional state. THC, on the other hand, you know, it hits the brain. Yes, some of it's going to be the intoxication, but in tandem, you're going to hit the CB1 receptors that are in those feeding circuits as well. And the consequence of that is going to be...

I mean, the way I kind of analogize it to people is I say it's almost like tricking the brain into thinking that you've been fasting because you're now activating receptors that are normally activated following kind of a fasting state.

And as a consequence of that, it pushes someone or an organism or human or whatever into a state of food-seeking behavior because now food also has high reward value and they're kind of – the way their food circuitry is responding in the brain at least seems to be similar to what would happen if they've been fasted.

And the thought is that's why when people, you know, when someone gets stoned, they're not like going to eat lettuce. They want high calorie food. They tend to like things that are high carb, high fat. That combo seems to be what people like when they're intoxicated with cannabis. And that comes with a lot of calories. And the point of that would be you're trying to replenish lost energy stores.

And so This at least is the kind of the theory that I have about what it is that it's doing is, you know, and I think you can make this analogy for multiple different things.

You know, if we talk about pain or stress, we can say similar kinds of things are going on, is that endocannabinoids normally do one thing, but when THC hits the brain, it's still activating these circuits in addition to everything else it hits.

So you still drive that response that the endocannabinoid system normally physiologically controls, but you're almost like tricking the brain into thinking you're in that state now. And so then, yeah, you go into food-seeking behavior mode.

I mean, honestly, this is a bit of a tricky one to speak to because I just don't think there's good evidence for it. Either way or? I just don't. I mean, as far as I'm aware, it hasn't been studied in a lot of depth.

I mean, there's some things, you know, a lot of the stuff that's been done is usually more like kind of acute memory tasks, like a working memory or recall or something like this, as opposed to explicitly studying focus. Anecdotally, there is certainly a lot of people that report that. Yeah.

I don't think I would say that. I don't think you could lump anything in that context. I mean, I would say the only thing you can say confidently that I would be comfortable saying is that acutely while someone's intoxicated on cannabis, there is definitely short-term effects on memory processing. So people tend to- Negative effects or enhancements or decrements?

I would say most of it has to do with recall or consolidation. So there does seem to be some, I mean, certainly the animal evidence is very compelling there, but again, we can talk to what some of the limitations of that are. But in humans, I would say most of the work that's been done would suggest there is some short-term memory deficits that are present during the intoxicated state.

I have not seen very much compelling evidence of long-term effects that emerge like when someone's not intoxicated but they use cannabis somewhat regularly. I don't think there's anything compelling for that.

And even in that case, like Carrie Cutler who's at Washington State, she's done a lot of this stuff looking at cognitive processing and different kinds of memory tasks in users while they're stoned often. And – Within a person, either they have adapted to using it as much as they do, or they've developed some form of tolerance to it.

But even in regular users, the impact on memory processing is usually not super robust. It's still there. The effects that are more often seen in kind of, let's say, smaller laboratory studies where they're using people who've used cannabis but aren't regular users might be a little bit more profound because they may not be used to that state, let's say.

I mean, there's certainly something we call state-dependent learning, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And this is something people – I mean, I remember learning about this in undergrad through alcohol. So like, you know, someone, first time they get drunk, tries doing something, they're very bad at the task.

But if every time they're drunk, they do that task, they become better at doing it under the influence. And so then all of a sudden, you know, they regularly do this task while they're drunk and someone tests them and they don't look like they're impaired at all because they've done it so much.

I don't think better off, no. But they would probably score better than someone who had never studied drunk and came to the test drunk. Correct. Just because they had had some state-dependent learning. And so I think when we're talking about, if you're talking about someone who's a chronic cannabis user, they're going to have done a lot of cognitive tasks while they're under the influence.

And so if you acutely test them, the impairment you might see in them is probably less than you would see in someone who's relatively naive or a much less experienced user. That being said, I think it's,

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