Many smokers claim that a cigarette helps to relax in a stressful situation, focus on the problem, better learn the material when preparing for an exam or report... According to researchers from Uppsala University (Sweden), there is a truth: the special brain cells that are sensitive to nicotine and is responsible for memory.

It is about the hippocampus center in the brain that is involved in gathering information and making short-term memory to long-term. He is able to receive impulses from the most remote of neurons, and it departments communicate between themselves and adjacent to the hippocampus subsidiary plots like interinale crust. It helps the brain to process the experience and keep them in memory.

In addition, scientists discovered inside the hippocampus kind of cells that affect the exchange of information between the hippocampus and entorhinal bark. Upon excitation of these cells using light pulses in experimental mice were changing the intensity of information exchange between nerve centers. While inactive cells intensity of local information exchange, in contrast, decreased.

Interestingly, exactly this effect were given nicotine. Once in the rodent brain, he raised cells, connecting the main neurons of the hippocampus with other centers of memory. This led to more intensive work of the local neural circuits.

That is why we think better with a cigarette, experts say: thanks to strengthen local neural circuits in the hippocampus and related areas of the brain able to effectively structure the information, to remove and to send "long-term" storage... In case, if these cells are not too great activity, the hippocampus is filled with a large amount of information that the brain is simply not able to process and remember.

But this, of course, does not mean that in order to improve their memory, we have to become smokers. Firstly, the damage from nicotine has not been canceled, and the constant Smoking continues to face chronic bronchial diseases and lung cancer. So before receiving the Nobel prize for his genius, you may not survive.

Secondly, Smoking greatly weakens the nervous system. Not having received another portion of nicotine, the smoker becomes nervous, literally no way out...

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago concluded that prolonged exposure to cigarette smoke increases the level of the stress hormone - norepinephrine and leads to deformation of the left heart ventricle (because norepinephrine increases the need heart and other tissues of oxygen, which leads to their rapid wear).

And specialists from Boston University headed by Dr. Abraham Speer studied the patterns of the bronchial epithelium cells taken from 75 people, 34 of which were current smokers, 23 had never smoked, and 18 quit Smoking after they have on the ground DC area have developed chronic bronchitis... In the cells of smokers (even those who a few years ago ceased to use tobacco) were identified genetic changes that were missing in healthy people.

A group of employees of the University of Florida, headed by Professor of psychology Carlos Bolanos experimentally proved that Smoking in adolescence may, through the decades to lead to mental disorders. Lab rats treated in childhood nicotine, in adulthood get depressed, nervous, had lost his appetite and behaved inappropriately. However, this effect was observed only in those cases when the rats began the "use" nicotine at an early age.

If nicotine injections made to adult males, no significant deviations were observed. According to scientists, Smoking negatively affects only weak nervous system that leads to significant changes in its development. If the rats who have symptoms of depression, introduced antidepressants, nicotine, their health improved. However, the same thing happens with people: is the smoker in time not to get your "dose"as he begins to experience strong psychological discomfort...

It would be good scientists managed to create an analogue of nicotine, which has a positive impact centers memory, but it would not cause addiction and pathologies related to Smoking. However, hardly such a substance would still be called nicotine...