Encoding and decoding of connected discourse during altered states of consciousness.
The Journal of psychology January 1, 1976 D. Edwards, J. A. Harris, R. Biersner
Inhaling nitrous oxide (N2O) impairs verbal memory recall, especially when sentences are low in semantic context. Among 44 male U.S. Navy corpsmen aged 20–29, those who breathed N2O for 10 minutes made more errors repeating sentences than those who breathed air. Task complexity caused the most errors. Volunteers could partly compensate for variations in syntax and the gas state, but low semantic quality strongly hurt performance. The combination of N2O, low syntax, and low semantic context produced the highest error rate, while air, high syntax, and high semantic context produced the lowest.