JUST what effect does ecstasy have on the brain? Last week one group reported that it makes people less fluent, while another found it disturbs sleep patterns.
Lynn Taurah of London Metropolitan University asked nearly 1000 people to fill in a questionnaire on their sleep patterns and rated their sleep quality. People who had taken ecstasy in the past six months scored a sleepless 11 鈥� a normal score is 2.5. Those who had been off the drug for a year did almost as badly. But drinkers and cannabis users scored only slightly higher than normal.
Another team at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK set 33 ecstasy users and 63 non-users some party-game type tasks, such as writing down as many four-letter words beginning with the letter C as they could in 4 minutes. The ecstasy users came up with fewer words. Both sets of results were presented last week at a British Psychological Society conference in London.
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But if ecstasy does disturb sleep as much as Taurah鈥檚 study suggests, might sleep deprivation, rather than a damaged long-term memory, explain the poor fluency results? The Liverpool team think not. They found that on average, a tired ecstasy user performed worse than an equally tired non-user.