Jared W. Young

quote unquote normal state.

And so this has been seen before, but sometimes not so much.

But when we separated it out for those that don't use cannabis to those that do use cannabis, suddenly those people with bipolar disorder using cannabis actually performed far better than those that didn't.

And they actually performed at levels comparable to those that were healthy people that didn't use cannabis.

Yeah, when we think of racing thoughts, pressured speech, we think of high speed, high tempo.

And that can really come from a variety of sources.

But dopamine is one of them.

And it's actually one of our primary hypotheses.

One of the reasons we do Iowa gambling tasks, we can actually do cross-species work.

So we can actually get at neuromechanics by using the exact same task.

So thanks to Catherine Winstanley at UBC, we developed an Iowa gambling task for use with mice.

And we can recreate that.

And we have mice that have a hyper dopaminergic activity.

So lots of dopamine.

And they are worse at the task in the same way that people with bipolar disorder are.

So we think there's a dopamine mechanism there.

And a lot of dopamine can lead to

If you give THC to animals, it can actually reduce dopamine levels in specific regions.

And so we think there's something about the endocannabinoid system, that's the system cannabis works on, that leads to interacting with that dopamine.

And basically, we kind of think it's putting a brake on that dopamine release.