Psychedelics have long been credited for their creativity-boosting capabilities. Many practitioners of both microdoses and macrodoses report having enhanced creative capabilities during and following a psychedelic experience. Despite a large number of reports, evidence of the creativity-boosting capabilities of psychedelics was strictly anecdotal, until now!
A recent double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group study by a team of European scientists in partnership with the Beckley Foundation aimed to test and validate these reports.
"...we demonstrated that psilocybin (0.17 mg/kg) induced a time- and construct-related differentiation of effects on creative thinking. Acutely, psilocybin increased ratings of (spontaneous) creative insights, while decreasing (deliberate) task-based creativity. Seven days after psilocybin, number of novel ideas increased. Furthermore, we utilized an ultrahigh field multimodal brain imaging approach, and found that acute and persisting effects were predicted by within- and between-network connectivity of the default mode network. Findings add some support to historical claims that psychedelics can influence aspects of the creative process, potentially indicating them as a tool to investigate creativity and subsequent underlying neural mechanisms."
