Stoners have long suffered horrible jokes about their (possibly horrible) memory, but is there any truth to the connection? New research suggests there is — but it's probably not as big of a deal as you think.For the study , published online this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers looked at data for 3,385 people from 1986 to 2011. At the beginning of the study, everyone was between the ages of 18 to 30. Over the years, the researchers kept track of each participant's marijuana use and overall health. Then, 25 years later, in 2011, the participants also went through a verbal memory test, in which they had to remember 15 words. In addition, they took tests that measured their problem-solving speed and ability to focus on the task at hand.Results showed that 84% of the participants reported using marijuana at some point in their lives, but most of them weren't smoking regularly for very long.Only 392 participants (about 12%) reported still using weed in middle age, and only 311 (8%) had at least five years of pot use. Those who had recently used marijuana at the 25-year follow-up tended to have poorer scores on the word memory and problem-solving speed tests, but those who had used more marijuana throughout the course of their entire lifetimes only had worse scores on the memory task. Specifically, for every five years of daily marijuana use, people did worse on the memory test.What this suggests is that being a current user of marijuana might actually matter more for your memory and problem-solving skills than how much you've smoked over your lifetime —though bombing a memory test isn't great news either.