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substance causes mental injuries that make a person less capable of saying no to using a substance. For example, a study entitled “Cognitive Effects of Nicotine: Recent Progress” found that people who smoked—defined as those with a tobacco use disorder, or TUD—were often at a higher risk of developing cognitive defects. The study also found that people with pre-existing cognitive defects were at a higher risk of nicotine use and struggled to quit. “Cumulating evidence suggests that individuals with cognitive deficits may be both more vulnerable to developing TUD, and may have more difficulty in quitting smoking,” wrote researchers Gerald Valentine and Mehmet Sofuoglu. “Cognitive deficits associated with TUD are well documented in both clinical and population-based studies.… Cigarette smokers have cognitive deficits in auditory–verbal and visuospatial learning, visuospatial memory, cognitive efficiency, executive skills, general intelligence, and processing speed.” In essence, this means that people who smoke are damaging their brains and reducing their capacity to learn new knowledge and apply previously learned concepts. In their conclusion, Valentine and Sofuoglu wrote, “Smokers demonstrated deficits in attention, working memory, and impulse control functions, although the severity of the deficits was not correlated with the duration of tobacco use. Furthermore, smokers with even low amounts of lifetime tobacco exposure display these deficits, suggesting that individuals with deficits in certain cognitive domains may be predisposed to developing TUD.” That last sentence is particularly critical to note: it suggests that people with certain types of cognitive problems may be more prone to addiction than others. This health problem can be hard to manage in adults, let alone in teens. The brain, in this way, may betray a teen and impulsively get them to smoke and then trap them into a cycle of addiction that further damages their thinking skills.

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Nicotine Affects Learning Capabilities