Richard C. Stillman

Bio: Richard C. Stillman is an academic researcher from National Institute on Drug Abuse. The author has contributed to research in topics: Antiemetic & Recall. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 13 publications receiving 432 citations. Previous affiliations of Richard C. Stillman include Veterans Health Administration.

A prospective evaluation of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol as an antiemetic in patients receiving adriamycin and cytoxan chemotherapy.

Abstract: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of oral and smoked delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) was performed in eight patients with resected soft tissue sarcomas who received adjuvant Adriamycin and Cytoxan chemotherapy. Each patient served as his own control. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, in comparison with a placebo, did not significantly reduce the number of vomiting and retching episodes, volume of emesis, degree of nausea, or duration of nausea. In contrast to a previous report where significant antiemetic effects of THC were observed in patients receiving high-dose methotrexate, THC did not effectively reduce emesis induced by Adriamycin and Cytoxan. These findings suggest that the antiemetic properties of THC are effective only against specific chemotherapeutic drugs.

Blood and urine levels of N,N-dimethyltryptamine following administration of psychoactive dosages to human subjects.

Abstract: Psychoactive doses (0.7 mg/kg) of the hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) were administered intramuscularly to 11 normal subjects. A gas chromatographic-mass spectrometric isotope dilution determination of DMT concentrations in whole blood and urine revealed that only a fraction of the injected dose was recovered and the blood DMT concentrations had a very similar time course o the subjectively reported “high”.

Improved performance 4 hours after cocaine

Abstract: Cocaine (2 mg/kg) was given orally to 13 healthy volunteers and physiologic, subjective, attentional and performance effects were measured over a period of 4 h. Posner's reaction time paradigm measured the effects of cocaine on performance and on attention to visual cues. Cocaine increased heart rate, systolic blood pressure and pupil diameter and reduced skin temperature. Physiologic effects, subjective rating of intoxication, and cocaine levels in saliva peaked at approximately 75 min and returned to precocaine levels within 3 h. In contrast, a reaction time measure of performance speed on the visual attention task showed improvement for 4 h after cocaine. A measure of covert attention in the cocaine condition failed to show the improvement which occurred in the placebo condition. Less fatigue was reported 4 h after cocaine than after placebo. Cocaine users may experience the drug's stimulant effects considerably longer than the euphoriant effects.

Mood and memory

Abstract: This article describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in subjects by hyp- notic suggestion to investigate the influence of emo- tions on memory and thinking. One result was that subjects exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; people recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in dur- ing recall. Second, emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities (e.g., angry subjects generated an- gry associates, told hostile stories, and were prone to find fault with others). Third, when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. Thus, sad readers attended more to sad material, identified with a sad character from a story, and recalled more about that character. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these several results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and per- ceptual categorization.

Précis of Elements of episodic memory..

Abstract: Elements of episodic memory (Tulving 1983b) consists of three parts. Part I argues for the distinction between episodic and semantic memory as functionally separate albeit closely interacting systems. It begins with a review of the 1972 essay on the topic (Tulving 1972) and its shortcomings, presents a somewhat more complete characterization of the two forms of memory than the one that was possible in 1972, and proceeds to discuss empirical and theoretical reasons for a tentative acceptance of the functional distinction between the two systems and its possible extensions. Part II describes a framework for the study of episodic memory, dubbed General Abstract Processing System (GAPS). The basic unit in such study is an act of remembering. It begins with the witnessing of an event and ends with recollective experience of the event, with related memory performance, or both. The framework specifies a number of components (elements) of the act of remembering and their interrelations, classified under two broad categories of encoding and retrieval. Part III discusses experimental research under the label of “synergistic ecphory.” Ecphory is one of the central elements of retrieval; “synergistic” refers to the joint influence that the stored episodic information and the cognitively present retrieval information exert on the construction of the product of ecphory, the so-called ecphoric information. The concept of encoding specificity and the phenomenon of recognition failure of recallable words figure prominently in Part III. The final chapter of the book describes a model, named the synergistic ecphory model of retrieval, that relates qualitative characteristics of recollective experience and quantitative measures of memory performance in recall and recognition to the conjunction of episodic-memory traces and semantic-memory retrieval cues.

Environmental context and human memory

Abstract: Five experiments examined the effects of environmental context on recall and recognition. In Experiment 1, variability of input environments produced higher free recall performance than unchanged input environments. Experiment 2 showed improvements in cued recall when storage and test contexts matched, using a paradigm that unconfounded the variables of context mismatching and context change. In Experiment 3, recall of categories and recall of words within a category were better for same-context than different-context recall. In Experiment 4, subjects given identical input conditions showed strong effects of environmental context when given a free recall test, yet showed no main effects of context on a recognition test. The absence of an environmental context effect on recognition was replicated in Experiment 5, using a cued recognition task to control the semantic encodings of test words. In the discussion of these experiments, environmental context is compared with other types of context, and an attempt is made to identify the memory processes influenced by environmental context.