Comment les psychédéliques inspirent l'innovation créative : Expliqué

In recent years, when it comes to psychedelics, the focus has been on their potential to treat numerous mental health conditions, from dépression à troubles alimentaires. However, there has been a long-standing relationship between psychedelics and creativity that despite being well-known, has not, until now, been well-understood. 

The exciting exploration of psychedelics as creative enhancers offers a new dimension to psychedelic research, beyond that of the therapeutic or medical sphere. It also encourages a more nuanced way of integrating psychedelics into your life.

Basically — are you feeling stuck creatively?

Do you want a new way of looking at a problem?

Might you need a little push to think-outside-of-the box?

Bien, psychedelics could be the key. 

Qu'est-ce que la créativité ?

We often talk about creativity, and praise it as a characteristic. But what actually defines creativity? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. ‘Creativity’ is the ability to generate new ideas, solutions, conceptset possibilities dans un unique et original way. Whether it’s solving a work-related problem, or what note should come next in a chord progression, creativity is about seeing new ways to move forward. 

Creativity can manifest through thought and analysis — such putting together unexpected pieces of information. Or it can come to you in a flash — an unexpected and bold solution or idea! You probably use your creativity far more than you think, even just to adapt to the everchanging obstacles and unexpected moments of daily life. 

Most people primarily associate psychedelic creative insight with the arts. The psychedelic rock era of the 60s, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, the paintings of Alex Grey. People for whom living on the fringes or spearheading the counterculture is part of the job. However, in recent times, with the stigma of psychedelic-use greatly reduced, more figures from the fields of science and technology are coming forward to cite psychedelics as an influence on their own creative breakthroughs. 

Famous Figures Inspired by Psychedelic Experiences

We’ve all heard that the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs described LSD as “one of the most important things” he ever did in regards to the creation of his company. But did you know that Nobel laureate Francis Crick credited LSD with helping him to discover the structure of DNA? Or that biochemist Kary Mullis également describes the psychedelic as playing a key part in his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique? 

A prime example of how psychedelics can enhance your creativity by expanding your perspective, Mullis explained that while he did not have his Eureka! moment while on LSD, it helped him to “inhabit” the DNA molecules he was working with from a fresh angle. 

“PCR’s another place where I was down there with the molecules when I discovered it and I wasn’t stoned on LSD, but my mind by then had learned how to get down there. I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymerase go by,” Mullis said.

How Altered States of Consciousness Contribute to Scientific Breakthroughs

Throughout history, those close cousins of psychedelic trips — dreams and hypnagogic (in-between sleeping and waking) states — have been linked to creative breakthroughs across disciplines and cultures. Stanislav Grof, the iconic psychiatrist and expert in non-ordinary states of consciousness, explained in his book LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine;

“It is a well-known fact that many important ideas and solutions to problems did not originate in the context of logical reasoning, but in various unusual states of mind – in dreams, while falling asleep or awakening, at times of extreme physical and mental fatigue, or during an illness with high fever.”

Famous examples of those who had breakthroughs during these moments are Albert Einstein (with the basic principles of his special Theory of Relativity) and Nikola Tesla (the electric generator). 

There is also the iconic tale of German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé, who was dozing by the fire when he had a striking vision of molecules transforming into snakes, in which one twisted into a circle, devouring its own tail like a ouroboros. It then hit him that the structure of the chemical he had been studying, benzene, was actually a closed ring. 

When Dreams Come True?

Recent research has shown that these dream, or dream-like, states are very similar to psychedelic states. What makes them both breeding-grounds for creativity is that they induce a heightened capacity for mental imagery and visualization, and allow for a more associative and fluid way of thinking. Basically, your mind becomes free-flowing, unhindered by traditional logic. This means that novel and out-side-of-the-box ideas can occur. 

The authors of a 2022 papier on psychedelics as tools for creative insight wrote;

“The psychedelic state may have its own characteristic features making it amenable to creativity enhancement, such as brain hyperconnectivity, meta-cognitive awareness, access to a more dependable and sustained altered state experience, and potential for eliciting sustained shifts in trait openness.”

Psychedelics and Creative Problem Solving: The Research

At the end of the first golden-age of psychedelic research, in 1966 (LSD had just been criminalised in California) researchers Willis Harman and James Fadiman a publié un étude which found that psychedelics were able to boost creativity. Aiming to examine the role of psychedelics in creative problem solving, they gathered together a group of 27 professionals which included mathematicians, architects, and engineers. They gave them a dose of either LSD or mescaline and put them into small, carefully organized groups. Before the experiment the participants were asked to each choose one (or more) work-related problems that required a creative solution. 

Fascinatingly, the participants were able to come up with solutions to certain problems that they had been working on, and struggling with, for weeks, or even months. They reported that their inhibitions felt lower, they were able to contextualize their problem more broadly, they had greater capacity for visual imagery, and enhanced ideation. 

One participant from the 1966 study said;

“I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of. My mind seemed much freer to roam around the problems, and it was these periods of roaming around which produced solutions… I dismissed the original idea entirely, and started to approach the graphic problem in a radically different way. That was when things began to happen. All kinds of different possibilities came to mind,” 

While this study was groundbreaking, in today’s scientific climate, it would be considered a little lax as there were no controls (such as placebo groups) and the participants were told they would be more adept creatively before starting. Despite this, these results still show that psychedelics can enhance creativity — they solved those problems after all, didn’t they? 🤓

Microdosing Psilocybin and Creativity

Much of the recent interest in microdosage was triggered by its popularity among Silicon Valley tech workers as both a creativity enhancer et un productivity booster. However, it is a practice that is backed up by research. A 2018 étude by researchers at Leiden University, NL, gave psilocybin truffles to attendees at a Dutch Psychedelic Society event. They then invited them to participate in two creative problem-solving tasks to measure their divergent and convergent thinking abilities. The findings revealed that the participants scored slightly higher on both divergent and convergent thinking tasks after the magic truffle microdose. 

Openness and Creativity Go Hand-in-Hand

At a more general level, in terms of personality, psychedelics have been shown to increase openness to new experiences. A étude by Imperial College London, published in 2018, (that aimed to explore the effect of psilocybin on personality structures on individuals with treatment-resistant depression) found that the natural psychedelic increased the trait of ‘openness’. ‘Openness’, as a trait, is linked to  “new ideas and values, imagination, aesthetic appreciation, novelty-seeking, non-conformity, and creativity.” These findings seem to suggest that if you are more ‘open’ in general, creative thinking comes easier. 

It has also been shown that psychedelics can increase connectivity and communication between brain regions and networks. Areas of the brain that communicate less regularly, begin to, creating altered and dynamic ways of thinking, which can help us to throw off preconceptions and conventional thought patterns. 

Set Your Creativity Free

So, as you can see, the science behind how psychedelics can enhance our creativity is many layered. 

It seems that psychedelics are able to help us solve problems that have been nagging at us, by flipping our perspective. They appear to help us to link information together in ways we may not have considered before, by illuminating our different brain regions. They also appear to enhance our creativity in general by giving us a long-lasting openness, encouraging a more free way of thinking.

So the next time you feel a bit stuck with a creative goal, why not try a dose of psilocybin? Who knows what bright ideas or solutions you might come up with!

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