Psychedelics have been explored by artists, scientists and entrepreneurs during this century to leverage their peculiar ability to purportedly amplify innovative thinking and creative problem solving. Yet understanding the underlying basis for how this process works is only just beginning to emerge as a focus of modern scientific inquiry and mainstream cultural legitimacy.
The first modern study to investigate the potential of psilocybin to enhance the brain’s ability to unlock creativity and problem solving is now underway at the University of Texas, Austin. This investigation is led by Center for MINDS, an Austin, Texas-based research hub leading the way to scientifically legitimize the often opaque connection between psychedelic experience and creativity. This research continues a long tradition of investigating psychedelic experiences as a catalyst for creative insights.
Such explorations have a long history within artistic movements and innovation hubs across cultures and eras since the emergence of psychedelic compounds from indigenous healing traditions and clandestine labs into popular consciousness. After mesacline was first synthesized in 1919, it made its way into Parisian aristocracy in the 1920s and 30s, impacting the artistic output of great thinkers including Jean Paul Sartre, a leading figure in 20th century existentialism. Sartre would have been a Nobel Prize winner had he not famously declined the award “for fear that it would limit the impact of his writing.”
Over the next few decades, the impact of mescaline eventually reached writer Aldous Huxley in 1953, who followed up his trip a year later with his landmark work “The Doors of Perception.” By the late 1950’s, LSD had arrived on the scene of the Beat culture and influenced the work of seminal figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs among others. This opened the door to the first wave of mass cultural adoption of psychedelics and the subsequent artistic explosion of the LSD-fueled cultural revolution of the mid-1960s incubated in the San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury.
The late 1970’s emergence of the personal computer era in the San Francisco Bay Area was heavily shaped by psychedelic insights and this cultural momentum. The psychedelic culture in the Bay Area at this time intersected heavily with developments in Silicon Valley. The Homebrew Computer Club, for example, served as a focal point for psychedelically catalyzed innovation. This inspired the ethos of the ‘Garage Founder’ while famously accelerating the research and development of projects by Apple Co-Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak among others.
In 1985, the Whole Earth Lectronic Link (WELL) virtual community was co-founded by Stewart Brand, a techno-utopian visionary inspired by his psychedelic experiences in the 1960’s. The WELL community, which continues to this day, serves as a bridge between the 1960s psychedelic counterculture and the development of the internet and cyberculture. The WELL accelerated Silicon Valley “Maker Culture,” laying the foundation for the digital world we inhabit today.
The link between innovation in the personal computer and software industry with psychedelic experience has been so thoroughly publicized that the “Silicon Valley Psychedelic Bro” is now a cultural trope. High profile engineers and founders like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and many more are all on the record espousing the creative benefits their psychedelic experiences have yielded.
Although psychedelic use in his creative process has never been explicitly disclosed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he was appointed to the executive position he held for ten years only after he was brought to the psychedelic culture of the Burning Man festival alongside other key Google personnel to assess his fitness in a “group flow state.”
The Present Moment
Today, as psychedelics are poised to achieve mainstream institutional legitimacy as FDA-approved medicines, the rich tradition of psychedelic experience as a creative catalyst and amplifier of imagination is beginning to receive legitimate scientific and cultural recognition.
The MINDS study, known as Mind FLUX, is led by Dr. Manoj Doss and Dr. Greg Fonzo at the University of Charmaine & Gordon McGill Center for Psychedelic Research & Therapy. According to MINDS, this is a first-of-its-kind investigation is exploring whether psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms, “can enhance the brain’s capacity for processing fluency, a mental state linked to creativity, insight and flexible thinking.”
The Center for MINDS, which says it is accelerating “Psychedelic-Assisted Innovation,” was founded by scientist Bruce Damer, who attributes his insights into the origins of life on earth to a breakthrough experienced under the influence of ayahuasca. MINDS is engaged in the study of neurocognitive processes related to creative problem solving and information processing under the influence of psychedelics, among other ventures.
The MINDS multi-year study into psychedelics and creativity is being conducted in three phases. The first phrase is a survey of innovators during which data is gathered from technical professionals and creatives who have used psychedelics to solve real-world problems. This is followed by a clinical study with fMRI using brain scans and cognitive assessments to measure the effect of psilocybin on fluency, memory, and creative thinking. Finally, there is a third phase of real-world application which will design future research with professionals to test the impact of psychedelics on real-world insight and innovation.
MINDS’ Scientific Director Manesh Girn told Lucid News that psychedelic experiences have long been associated with creative insights and breakthroughs, but not because they magically “make people more creative.” Instead, says Girn, “they appear to temporarily alter how the mind explores and organizes ideas. Psychedelics can relax habitual patterns of thought, broaden associative connections, and amplify the sense of meaning attached to inner experiences. This can make it easier to see problems from new angles, connect previously unrelated ideas, or reframe long-standing assumptions – all of which can help catalyze insights and breakthroughs.”
Psychedelics in the Business World
Psychedelics have in some ways reached a critical mass of adoption in the startup world. More entrepreneurs and business leaders than ever before extoll the benefits of intentional psychedelic use as a means of boosting their ability to navigate creative problem solving in a business context.
On January 17, Center for MINDS collaborated with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination to produce the Imaginarium: A Daylong Symposium on Psychedelics and Creativity event at University of California San Diego, marking the first scientific conference explicitly geared towards exploring the connection between psychedelics and creativity. The one day event focused on the potential of psychedelics to catalyze creativity and imagination while platforming artistic luminaries like Alex and Allyson Grey, psychedelic comedian Shane Mauss and multimedia journalist Hamilton Morris.
The event was a milestone in that it was likely the first academic and research focused psychedelic event to examine psychedelic through a purely creative and problem solving ability lens. “In a world where the foundational neurological processes of psychedelic creativity are largely unmapped, this project breaks new ground, testing a new potential mechanism of creativity, exploring the unique role of the hippocampus in generation or suppression of episodic memory,” says MINDS.
“Being in a classic psychedelic altered state can allow my brain to break through normative patterns and connect different ideas or recognize new patterns which can lead to breakthroughs that push my business forward and in so doing lead to innovation across my entire industry,” observes nootropic industry pioneer Robert Lattig of Healing Herbals.
As psychedelics continue to gain a foothold in modern medicine, their ability to serve human ingenuity in a multi-faceted way beyond therapeutic mechanisms is being embraced and explored alongside their other myriad benefits. As the planetary and civilizational scale challenges facing humanity continue to compound, the role of psychedelic experiences in catalyzing creative breakthroughs and facilitating high-level problem solving may help maintain optimism in the face of polycrisis, illuminating the way forward.
“Whether it’s the discovery of PCR, HyperCard, the nature of the origin of life, or even American psychology itself, psychedelic-induced insights appear to have had a significant impact throughout history” says journalist Mattha Busby, who recently profiled Damer for a story detailing the connection between Damer’s psychedelic experience and a scientific breakthrough.
“The stigma around drug-fuelled adventures into weird worlds is beginning to fade and a bonafide new field is emerging: that of psychedelics for creative problem solving and insight,” said Busby. “The first modern study to investigate the potential of psilocybin to biohack the brain is getting underway and VC funds are paying attention. If psychedelics can help spur an era of even greater scientific and technological advancement, separating real insight from pie in the sky ‘downloads’ will be key.”
Source: Lucid News
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The pharmaceutical industry is very powerful. They have very little interest in such a powerful natural medicine, such as psilocybin mushrooms, that can be grown at home. Slowly but surely, this information will become well known and legal.