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But they're so entirely convinced that these tales are true, that you have no choice but to believe them. Their fabulous rendition of what 'did not' happen can swing from them meeting the tooth fairy to even being mugged by a goat.
While sometimes you don't want to believe your friends when they get into these imaginative narratives, because they've smoked too much marijuana, there is actually scientific reasoning behind why your friend maybe stacking up these tall tales!
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A new study led by Lilian Kloft of the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, tried to make sense of the effects of cannabis on our memories and it turns out, smoking marijuana can actually tweak the truth for many people, for them to form their own fragmented realities.
While we already know smoking weed impairs ones long term and short term memory and makes it difficult to remember recent events and happenings, this new research found that people who are 'high' after smoking marijuana can formulate or create 'false memories'.
To figure out how marijuana affects anyone's memories, the researchers enlisted 64 volunteers and put them through a test involving both visual lists and virtual reality. In the first test, the participants were made to memorise a list of words and then made to recite them immediately after and also after a week. The participants were divided into two groups. One group was given THC-induced weed to smoke while the other was given fake weed, or a placebo with no quality to get them high whatsoever.
Based on their final answers the researchers realised that the people who were actually 'high' recited more random, made up and unrelated words compared to those who weren't high.
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To further verify the results of the test mentioned above, the participants from both the groups were put into virtual reality crime situations, something like a simulation. One participant was the eye-witness while another was the perpetrator, where half the group was again high and the other sober. After each simulation, the participants were interviewed and asked questions about their experience in the simulation, with purposely placed misinformation to throw them off-track, such as hinting that a gun was used in a situation where the robber used a knife.
Once again, the results proved that those who were high were pretty convinced about the misinformation given, while they'd experienced it happen and they tended to remember the false subjective details of the crime.
"People under the influence of cannabis show the highest risk for false memories for things or details that are poorly related to the original event. It appears that [cannabis-intoxicated people] have a 'yes' bias when they are uncertain about their memory, which makes them sort of random and unreliable responders," Lilian Kloft concluded.
The researchers repeated the same test on the same bunch of people a week after to see how participants responded after they sobered up. When the tests were conducted on the same bunch of sober people, there was no significance difference in memory span of those who used marijuana the week before and those who didn't, showing us that smoking regularly does decay one's memory over time.
The study has been published in the journal ' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' , concluding that smoking weed can cause people to believe things that may not be true, therefore creating 'false memories' for people who smoke regularly.
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So, the next time when a friend is smoking weed and you're sober, concentrate on the stories they regale you with to see how they maybe creating stories that haven't happened. They obviously don't do it purposely to lie, and we have scientific backing to prove just that!
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