Can CBD Enhance Your Senses?
What about its effect on hunger? Here’s a look at how cannabis may affect your senses.
Food tastes better, music sounds amazing, and nature is more beautiful, but how can this be? The complacent feeling people get after consuming cannabis is all thanks to how cannabinoids affect the chemicals in our brains. This alteration in the brain is what gives us that calm feeling after consuming cannabis. Since cannabis affects so many parts of the body, how can it alter our senses? Let’s dive deeper into the effects cannabis has on our senses.
Smell
Did you know that consuming cannabis can actually enhance your sense of smell? One of the things I have noticed since I began using CBD oil is an enhancement of taste. The quality of taste seems extrasensory; I’m able to distinguish different flavors of different ingredients mixed into my food more prominently. I love it because I can enjoy the food like I do when I smoke cannabis, but without feeling the munchies. I can feel full and satisfied after a meal, instead of eating too much and becoming sluggish and head foggy.
There is some research into the reason for this. Studies have shown that THC can enhance the sense of smell in mice. According to the study, THC affects the olfactory bulb in animals, which is the part of the brain that allows you to smell. The study had a bunch of mice try to find cheese in a labyrinth. Half of the mice were given a dose of THC while the other half was not. The mice that were given the THC found the cheese much faster. Some of the mice that were not given THC could not find the cheese at all.
Taste and “The Munchies”
The typical stoner stereotype is that marijuana is associated with having the munchies. “The munchies” is a term used to describe that overwhelming sense of hunger after consuming cannabis that causes you to eat everything in sight. The happens because consuming cannabis can promote the production of ghrelin, otherwise known as the ‘hunger hormone’. Ghrelin is what causes the feeling of hunger food cravings. It’s released by the stomach, small intestines, pancreas, and brain.
When ghrelin is stimulated in humans, it can increase food intake by as much as 30 percent. This is also true when the hormone is increased by cannabis or any other external stimuli. The combination of ghrelin and dopamine is a perfect recipe for enhancing the flavor of whatever you want to eat after consuming cannabis.
Touch
One of the most popular reasons people turn to cannabis is for Relief from chronic pain. Many people say that they prefer to use cannabis over addictive prescription painkillers like opioids. Unfortunately, there are some instances when cannabis might actually increase your sense of touch, therefore making the pain worse. Although THC has been praised for years to reduce pain, high doses of THC can make the pain worse for some people.
A 2011 study has shown that low to moderate doses of THC may be successful in treating pain, but higher doses can have the opposite effect. This study found that moderate doses of THC were more effective than high doses at easing pain in humans. In fact, high doses of the cannabinoid actually seemed to increase pain sensitivity in the participants.
This is the reason it’s important to understand the entourage effect and the benefits of a full spectrum of cannabinoids to treat pain. THC alone won’t be enough to treat chronic pain. CBD and THC work together synergistically to fight pain in the body. CBD also regulates the power and efficacy of THC.
Unlike THC, CBD will not cause you to feel stoned, which is why it’s so popular today for those seeking healthy and natural pain relief options. Cannabis does not erase all pain, but many suffering from mild headaches to chronic pain swear by its pain relieving qualities.
Hearing
While there’s currently no connection between consuming cannabis and an enhanced sense of hearing, those who consume cannabis know that for some reason, it makes your favorite song sound better. Consuming cannabis won’t give you any hearing superpower, but it can make you appreciate and enjoy listening to your favorite songs more. If anyone claims that they can hear music and other sounds better after consuming cannabis, it’s probably just because they enjoy the song more when they are stoned. This is thanks to higher dopamine levels, which can enhance their reaction to music.
“Unable to explicitly keep in mind what has just been played, or to think ahead to what might be played, people stoned on pot tend to hear music from note to note” — Daniel J. Levitin
There is another study from 1976 that attempted to find a correlation between marijuana consumption and hearing through audio tests. Half of the test subjects were given cannabis and the other half was given a placebo. Each subject participated in a hearing test before and after consuming cannabis. The interesting thing about this particular study is that the researchers were trying to find a negative impact with cannabis and hearing., However, the result of the study was that smoking cannabis had little to no impact on any of the test subject’s hearing ability.
As laws around cannabis become more relaxed and scientists are able to conduct more research, I am sure that we’ll find so much more information on the effects cannabis has on our mind and body.
Does cannabis enhance your senses? Leave a comment!
