Smoking is associated with lower cognitive function in older adults
news.weill.cornell.edu
news.weill.cornell.edu
Seams like that is a statement that can not be made solely based on the stated connection. To me the initial thought that occurred when reading was something like:
"yeah well smoking is dangerous. People with more cognitive power are presumably better at reasoning themselves out of smoking; Given the fact that smoking is known to increase the risk of getting cancer."
If that description describes something that is a big factor in determining a persons smoking habit, smoking would not necessarily cause a cognitive decline as implied in the recommendation.
Thought experiment: Take 1000 13 year olds of equal cognitive capacity and place half in peer groups where some smoke half in peer groups where none smoke. I’m guessing there would end up being more of the first 500 that decide to take up the habit.
There is also a difference between cognitive function and reasoning capacity, the later also strongly influenced by socioeconomic factors.
When I did manage to kick them it was after I read the Easy way to quit smoking by Allen Carr which helped with the mindset then admittedly I ruined the data by moving house and starting a work from home job, therefore got rid of all of my cigarette initiating habits in one go.
The higher cognitive function that leads you to read books about quitting could be exactly the mechanism the GP describes.
If books can help you quit, less bookish people will quit less, all else equal.
FWIW, I also credit that book with me finally quitting the habit.
I was expecting a mix of "here's why it's bad" and "here's the good stuff, and at which milestone dates you'll notice them" maybe.
The stuff I already knew and believed in really strongly.. for 20 minutes until the third 'last' cigarette of the month.
If anyone else is stuck in a holding pattern of quitting it's worth giving it a shot. Promise no affiliation haha, go see if your local bookshop or charity shop has a used copy for 20p (the pages will be a deep yellow, of course)
Is it really just that the Easy Way is a self-referential thing and the Way is itself to think about the Way a lot and in doing so convince yourself or your subconscious that you’ve reached some sort of solution despite having not? Or was there some set of concrete messages I might just have missed?
Is the act of reading the book the thing itself?
More likely, people who smoke do function better cognitively with a cigarette in their hand. They are nervous and irritable without it. Their brains probably produce insufficient dopamine when they aren't smoking.
It's amazing for improving focus, I get a lot more work done, remember things very well and am more patient with people.
Doesn't seem addictive in this form either, I can go a week without it and no withdrawal.
Also no negative impact on sleep (unlike caffeine)
I quit smoking about 5 years before I was diagnosed with primarily-inattentive ADHD. Diagnosed with insufficient dopamine (uptake?), haha
There was a lot of burnout between the two, incidentally. At one point I'd decided to cut down on the caffeine too, it's almost like I was trying to burn out in hindsight :)
An intelligent addict will say: I realize it's terrible but I am losing the battle against the urges every day. Anything more than that smells like low cognitive ability to me.
Citation needed. As the GP pointed out, we have a correlation between addiction and lower cognitive function based on this study.
Not only is "plenty" not an objective quantity, but even an objectively large quantity is irrelevant if it's not a large percentage of the whole. 100k geniuses with addiction problems wouldn't disprove the rule if there are 1b people with addiction problems who are of below average intelligence.
You could swap "plenty" to "every" and it would still have the same problem
How many is plenty? And how does that compare to the general population? The claim isn’t that addiction and intelligence are mutually exclusive. Rather, the claim is that intelligence makes addiction less likely.
According to the study, alcoholics had a lower baseline IQ before becoming addicted to alcohol. So that does seem to support that lower cognitive function is somehow linked to becoming an addict.
Better to note that since the study isn't claiming every person who smokes suffer cognitive decline showing a person who is a genius and smokes isn't a counter
People do not have some hidden addict/not-addict bit.
Smart people become addicted to things at a lower rate than not-smart people, and smart people become un-addicted to things at a higher rate than not-smart people.
Emphasis mine. They don't appear to claim anything definitive. But given this new study, and others that claim causal links with smoking leading to atherosclerosis, etc., it's quite plausible. Yet they don't go too far, and still do the right thing and say may.
You are basically saying - if I am smart enough, I will reach this tantric nirvana in lotus position and wave away these pesky addictions forever (joking a bit but not that much). Not based in reality, which is more like permanent weakness or crack forms in your persona that you can never mend back to original state, just with tons of continuous effort keep working around it, till your last day. It gets a bit better over time, but it takes literally decades and not that much.
Very smart people struggled with addictions, and failed for their whole lives, even if they knew perfectly well how deep in shit they were. Cigarettes are much worse due to smart marketing of tobacco this lethal addiction was completely normalized by society, and in many places still is, so its extremely easy to access them in one's close circles. That's why roughly 95% of the tobacco addicts never succeeded with stopping.
Ignoring how absolutely mindboggingly stupid that statement is and how you expose yourself as a massive, clueless asshole ... the one thing your post achieves otherwise is exposing a lot of other people who are also completely disconnected from themselves and the people around them.
Way to go, asshole! :D
Hope you discover the unconscious parts of your mind that is causing you pain so you can deal with the issue, God luck!
When you inevitably fall from that undeserved high horse, you will cry like the bitch you are! :D
"A person who is not sad, is not unjustifiably rude to people."
As you are quick to point out, you might not feel the subjective felling. You telling me that could in a sense be seen as a confirmation that you have big blindspots and that you are therefore not unified.
From the press release, it does not seem that they took any measures to establish causation (like comparing IQ tests from the time before people started smoking). I would wager that people with higher cognitive abilities might be more amenable to the advice of their doctors.
I would argue that culture is a better root cause causal explanation, with stupidity and smoking both being consequences of that (though each with their own causal influence to some degree).
So that's one way smoking can be a cause of lower cognitive function.
Also smoking has a lot of non-nicotine garbage and poison.
Purest, "healthiest" method of consumption I found. Not sure if I'd call it a great thing though. It's still addictive, and no matter what anyone says, I'm pretty sure nicotine is a mild poison. Would advise anyone to stay clear of the substance, unless you're already an addict and currently smoking/vaping/snusing, then it's a great alternative.
There is no evidence that I am aware of that supports it otherwise improving cognition, but for many people anxiolytics will behave like nootropics (and indeed are sometimes listed as one!)
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/quit-smoking/7-com...
It further concludes:
> High doses of nicotine or repeated exposure may also promote anxiety (citing 3 studies)
> low doses of nicotine have a similar effect to decrease anxiety behaviours [...] whereas high doses of nicotine promote anxiety behaviours
The effects of nicotine as an anxiolytic are well known:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12151749/
Rat studies to find dose limits are a valid case for rat studies.
Obviously the query will bias the results, but I do believe this is true.
But there is a big difference between smoking and nicotine.
What other lifestyle factors involving the smoking demographic are you referencing?
I wonder if there's something about the effects on the brain over time that makes cognitive function worse over time, even if it's helpful in the short-term.
It's also possible people are self-medicating.
If you tested cognitive function on people who have been prescribed to adderall their entire lives vs. people who had not, you might find lower cognitive function in the group with ADD.. but that could also be due to the tests favouring neurotypical people.
So I’m changing that. I’m doing a complete sober month, after which I may go back to drinking occasionally, but only in social activities (once a week or less) and a limit of 3 drinks. So far I’m on track and I don’t miss it anymore (the first week I did.) It’s not worth the downside to me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/10my22...
Not just drinking booze, but how/what you drink. Imagine all that sludge passing into your system and the effect it has on you.
> My father shook his head.
> “What if two people told you?”
> Another shake.
> Ben leaned forward on his stump. “What if a dozen people told you, with perfect earnestness, that shamble-men were out in the fields, eating—”
> “Of course I wouldn’t believe them,” my father said, irritated. “It’s ridiculous.”
> “Of course it is,” Ben agreed, raising a finger. “But the real question is this: Would you go into the woods?”
— Patrick Rothfluss, The Name of the Wind
- Do not put your article behind a paywall. If you want the best scientists to look at your work they don't have much time to waste fiddling with logins and paywalls and so your work won't get analyzed by the people who could provide the most help. If you want to "win" in science in the long run, put it in the public domain. Or, to put it bluntly: #LicensesAreForLosers.
- You need to include a scatterplot up top. The importance thing when you talk about "cognitive function" is the distribution, not the average. If it lowers average cognitive function, but also increases odds of a higher outlier or two, then perhaps the tradeoff is worth it.
Won't they mostly be using some university IP with subscriptions to basically every journal and not see the paywalls in the first place? At least that was my experience of university.
I think a solid argument could be made that lack of usage of drugs (even just plain old marijuana at a minimum) causes more harm than smoking, my thinking being roughly: drugs can (at least temporarily) break through the mental state established by cultural ~programming, cultural programming is the underlying cause of many evils in the world, and many such evils can increase dependence on addictive substances as a coping mechanism.
I’m not anti drugs at all, I wish using didn’t put people in jails, and that everyone would be able to buy high quality, tested products from the government. That said, drugs can trigger quite a few episodes in people with other mental conditions (diagnosed or not), so while they’re fun for most people they’re not without some risk either.
Disagree. The net end result, which is unknown, is required to know the optimal approach.
> That said, drugs can trigger quite a few episodes in people with other mental conditions (diagnosed or not), so while they’re fun for most people they’re not without some risk either.
Unknown is the risks of running society according to the (unavoidably) delusional beliefs of influential people, under a highly illusory political system (that seems to be much more easily realized via drug usage).