Magic mushroom, computer-enhanced composite image.
Ask almost any psilocybin lover, and you’ll hear that magic mushrooms enhance creativity. But, really, should science trust the nearly universal experience of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of stoners?
Apparently not. A new study out of Maastricht University in the Netherlands is an attempt to experimentally assess psilocybin’s effect on creativity. As the researchers' paper in the peer-reviewed journal Translational Psychiatry makes clear, during their drug experience psilocybin users believe that their creativity is enhanced, and they do so even though their ability to generate and evaluate ideas has deteriorated. However, seven days after the drug experience, the deficits caused by psilocybin seem to disappear. One type of creative cognition may even be enhanced.
The Maastricht University team administered psilocybin to 30 study participants and gave a placebo to another 30.
During the hours after drug administration, the team assessed psilocybin’s immediate effects on creativity having participants complete a picture-related task requiring both correct answers and alternate answers. This was a test of convergent (“right answer”) creative cognition and divergent (“many possible answers”) creative cognition. Participants in the psilocybin group got more wrong answers than those in the placebo group. They were also unable to come up with more original, alternative answers than members of the placebo group.
A second task assessed stoned participants’ abilities at divergent (“casting a wide net for good answers”) thinking. It prompted them to list as many uses as possible for a common household object. Participants in the psilocybin group suggested fewer alternate uses than those in the placebo group.
All in all, the psilocybin group’s performance was dismal.
Six hours after receiving either the drug or the placebo, participants completed a survey in which they rated their agreement with a set of statements. The researchers were particularly interested in the answers to three questions related to spontaneous thinking. They were: “I felt very profound,” “I had insights into connections that had previously puzzled me,” and “I had very original thoughts.” The responses of participants who’d taken psilocybin showed that they believed their creative thinking to have been improved.
Eventually, however, the scores for measures of creative thinking took a small turn for the better. Seven days after the drug was administered, all study participants took slightly different versions of the picture and alternate-use-of-an-object tests they had taken in the hours after drug or placebo administration. This time, on the picture-related test, members of the psilocybin group got more right answers than they had before, though they were still outscored by members of the placebo group. When asked to list alternate uses for a different household object, however, they tended to generate more novel ideas than members of the placebo group.
What’s Creativity, Anyway?
Creativity
One simple way of explaining the goal of this study might be to boil it all down to the question, “Does psilocybin enhance creativity?”. However, that’s not really the assignment that this team of researchers gave themselves. Instead, they defined divergent and convergent thinking as two constructs of creativity, and they measured how well participants did on tasks related to those constructs. Improvement (or deterioration) related to either construct would be revealing about both psilocybin and the relevance of those constructs. In the end, the Maastricht University data showed that, acutely, psilocybin impaired performance on generating ideas (divergent thinking) and evaluating them (convergent thinking), and while it did it cloaked those impairments from the people who’d taken the psilocybin.
And, yes, that might be appalling news to psilocybin lovers everywhere.
But, wait. Not quite so fast. While the research team admitted to being surprised at what they called “a discrepancy between objective vs subjective creative performance,” they suggested an alternate way to interpret their data, valuable because it explicates something about creativity itself. The discrepancy highlighted a difference between “spontaneous vs. deliberative creative cognition.” Deliberative creative cognition, they explained, is focused on meeting the demands of any given task. Spontaneous creative cognition is different. It tends to occur “in a mental state characterized by unrestrained cognition and defocused attention, and tend[s] to be more random, unfiltered, and bizarre....” Psilocybin and other psychedelics, the researchers suggested, may increase the potential for spontaneous — and decrease the potential for deliberative — creative cognition. If creativity that’s productive requires a balance between spontaneity and deliberation, psychedelics are, unfortunately, disruptive, at least while a user is stoned.
Over time, though, that balance is re-established. Indeed, after seven days have passed, deliberative creative cognition may even be enhanced, as was made evident in data showing an increase in the number of novel ideas one week after drug use. Concluding their paper, the researchers went so far as so say that, “while under the influence of a psychedelic, [a person’s] rigid thought content ... could be decreased, while unguided, spontaneous thoughts may give rise to new insights and perspectives of previous events and current problems.”
This is to stay that the researchers pointed to insight, not problem-solving, as a possible positive effect of psilocybin use. So, go ahead; cue a collective sigh of relief from the psychedelic fans. And while you’re at it, cue more studies, this time about insight.
The Maastricht University authors of the paper in Translational Psychiatry are N. L. Mason, K. P. C. Kuypers, J. T. Reckweg, F. Müller, D. H. Y. Tse, B. Da Rios, S. W. Toennes, P. Stiers, A. Feilding and J. G. Ramaekers. The paper also examines fMRI evidence of the effects of psilocybin on the brain and on hypothesized creativity centers in the brain.