So , before moving into specifics of taking cannabis or not taking cannabis , who should , who shouldn't , what the medicinal purposes are and what some of the newer exciting data point to I just briefly want to make a list and I promise very briefly , I know I'm not often concise , but I do try to be thorough for your sake . I wanna make a very brief list of the different brain areas that are impacted by THC and CBD and why THC and CBD have the various effects they do when somebody smokes or ingests cannabis doesn't matter what the THC or CBD ratio is if they experience deficits in memory and that's almost always present , that's going to be because of reductions in electrical activity within this brain region . We call the hippocampus .
If it's consumed over long periods of time , we'll talk about short , medium and long term consumption , occasional consumption going forward . So what I'd like you to take away from this component of the discussion is first of all the mechanism of action by which cannabis impacts the brain and body . But in particular , the brain is going to be through CB one receptors and those CB one receptors can lead to either an acceleration or a break on particular biological mechanisms .
Ok . So if someone smokes cannabis or they ingest cannabis very rapidly gets into the bloodstream and the components that are psychoactive , get into the bloodstream and are immediately able to access neurons and other cells and start having these effects of parking at those endogenous cannabinoid receptors and impacting the signaling between neurons , which leads to the subjective effects of cannabis including THC and CBD . So let's talk about what those different subjective effects are .
So we tend to increase focus . This is something that's not often discussed about cannabis , but it can , especially the sativa varieties can increase people's level of focus to particular things that something they're watching or something they're doing or music allows them to narrow their sense of focus that's going to occur by activation of CB one receptors in the so called prefrontal cortex , which is just behind the forehead . And the prefrontal cortex acts as a strong modulator of so called limbic circuitry and other circuitry that is more stress oriented .
But Indica also tends to suppress activation of the amygdala and threat detection centers in the brain again , binding the same CB one receptors and those retrograde signaling mechanisms that talked about before . But it also tends to shut down the hippocampus , an area of the brain associated with memory , which is why Indica varieties lead to pronounced or I should say profound defects in short term memory and sometimes in long term memory as well . If it's consumed over long periods of time , we'll talk about short , medium and long term consumption , occasional consumption going forward .
