While nicotine can acutely enhance cognitive capacity, smoking and vaping decrease cognitive function due to disruption of brain vasculature and endothelial cell dysfunction.

“And when you disrupt a vasculature through this endothelial cell dysfunction, you get things like interstitial, which just means in the spaces between dysfunction. So it's not just beating up the endothelial cells themselves, but the spaces between the cells is being disrupted. There's a lot of debris that accumulates there. And as a consequence, the brain just simply will not function as well. So you start getting short term memory lapses, you start getting working memory lapses, working memory is the sort of memory if someone tells you their seven digit phone number, typically nowadays people just share their info, but seven digit phone number or a sequence of numbers or an address and your inability to remember that.”

“Now you might say cognitive decline, I thought that nicotine increases the likelihood that we can maintain healthy neural function and cognitive capacity. It might even increase cognitive capacity in a potent way in the short term, and indeed it does. However, cigarette smoking and vaping are now known to dramatically decrease cognitive function because one of the key things about the brain is that it is the most metabolically demanding organ, which means it consumes a lot of glucose.”