If you’ve heard our marijuana presentation, then you probably are familiar with why people who smoke marijuana get the munchies. Basically, what happens is marijuana stops your brain from being able to figure out what is important and what is not. Right now, your brain is processing about 11 million pieces of information at any given moment. However, even though our brains are incredibly complex, they can only process about 50 pieces of information at any given moment. So, what our amazing brain does is it cancels out a lot of information that it deems unimportant.
Check this out:
Can you feel the shoes on your feet? Probably after I asked, right, but not before. Can you feel the shirt you’re wearing? Or the glasses on your face if you’re a glasses wearer? Probably only after I asked, right? If you even focus, you’ll realize that you can actually see the tip of your nose all the time, but your brain says that that information is not important.
Your brain is constantly doing little checks to make sure everything is okay. Making sure there’s not an imbalance of oxygen vs CO2, making sure your temperature stays pretty close to regular, and also, making sure you have enough food. When your brain sends a little check down to the stomach and says “hey stomach, is everything normal?” and your stomach sends a signal back, “yep, just ate a few minutes ago, we’re all good” your brain will probably ignore that signal.
When someone smokes weed, it basically makes the brain unable to differentiate what is important and what isn’t, so the brain gets stuck trying to process 11 million pieces of information. It essentially causes a traffic jam in your brain’s signal sending department, and this is why someone who smokes weed will just sit and stare at things for a long period of time. Additionally, when the brain sends that signal down to the stomach, the signal back is stuck in traffic. The brain doesn’t get a response from the stomach, and it sends down heavy foods to try and illicit a signal.
Well it turns out that the same thing happens in worms!
A study published in Current Biology on April 20 reveals that nematode worms (C. elegans) exhibit “munchies” behavior similar to humans when exposed to cannabinoids. Led by Shawn Lockery at the University of Oregon, the research showed that cannabinoids increased the worms’ appetite for preferred foods, paralleling marijuana’s effects on human appetites. Remarkably, this behavior has been preserved across 500 million years of evolution. The study found that the worms’ food preferences were influenced by cannabinoids binding to their receptors, and replacing these with human receptors yielded similar results. This discovery may aid in developing drugs targeting cannabinoid signaling, with significant health implications.
