All humans are naturally creative. For hundreds of thousands of years, our species has been dependent on this superpower to help us adapt to environmental changes and cope with the many challenges we face.
On the other hand, a lack of mental flexibility can pull us down into spirals of anxiety and depression where we get stuck ruminating on the same rigid, negative thought patterns over and over again.
Two Main Ingredients for Creative Processing
In order for new creative thoughts to stick, our brains need to toggle back and forth between two very different states. The center of our Divergent Thinking resides in the Default Mode Network (DMN) and is responsible for generating new ideas. But it’s our Convergent Thinking, located in the Frontoparietal Control Network (FPN), that determines whether the new ideas are useful or not. Though these two regions work well together to provide us with powerful problem-solving abilities, they actually function in ways that are typically in opposition.
How Psychedelics Loosen Up the Brain
The DMN and FPN are both regions that experience big changes when in an altered psychedelic state. While these opposing networks usually operate in a very organized way, research has found that this organization breaks down during a psychedelic experience, and these resting state networks undergo higher levels of connection.
The most interesting part? During large dose journeys, research participants were found to have
fewer novel thoughts, not more.
“…our data could suggest that psilocybin acutely impairs the idea generation and evaluation phase of creative thinking, while enhancing the feelings of quality of generated ideas (measured via the subjective questionnaire of insightfulness), despite lack of objective evidence…Increased feelings of insight, changes in affect, and attribution of meaning to previously neutral stimuli are recognized as common acute effects of psychedelic drugs, and thus it is plausible that reports of increased creativity during the acute psychedelic state are due to a subjective sense of creativity enhancement that does not match the objective quality” (N.L. Mason, et al., 2021)
During a large dose psychedelic experience, a journeyer doesn’t actually generate more novel ideas or new insights, but they are finding meaning in things they previously overlooked. They feel like they are having downloads of wisdom, often from a source greater than themselves. It is a subjective experience, and journeyers often feel the “quality of generated ideas”. They are appreciating, and often even
delighting in, what they are perceiving and processing.
There are still spontaneous creative thoughts happening in the midst of a journey, but
they are not oriented around deliberate, task-based problem solving.
But Wait, There’s More
Here’s where it gets even better. Research participants for the large dose study had their creativity evaluated again 7 days after their psychedelic journey, and although they experienced a drop in novel thought during their experience, their post-journey evaluations revealed an
increase in both Divergent Thinking and Convergent Thinking.
They had measurable gains in deliberate, creative thought one week after their psychedelic journeys.
Microdosing, on the other hand, has been shown to increase convergent and divergent thinking without the big trip. More studies are needed, but the data shows people are experiencing more problem-solving power, important insights, and a
boost in creativity — data that was gathered using many of the same evaluation tools from the larger, high dose studies.
Brain imaging reveals long term, persistent increases in DMN connectivity, which leads to greater idea generation and freedom from those sticky negative thought patterns. Not only does the brain experience more harmonious and abundant creation of new ideas and perspectives, users tend to believe there is a deeper quality to the ideas being generated. In short,
psilocybin is, in fact, a very useful tool for mental flexibility.
As Wayfinders, we know the difference between clean pain and dirty pain and that our suffering is rooted in our thoughts. Psychedelics, especially when thoughtfully paired with Wayfinder tools, are a powerful ally in helping us question and transform our limiting beliefs. This is a time when Wayfinder skills are needed more than ever to help us adapt and think creatively to overcome extreme challenges in our world, and we’re honored to be doing this work in partnership with the wisdom of sacred psychedelic medicine.
References
- Mason, N.L., Kuypers, K.P.C., Reckweg, J.T. et al. Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure.Transl Psychiatry 11, 209 (2021).
- Prochazkova L, Lippelt DP, Colzato LS, Kuchar M, Sjoerds Z, Hommel B. Exploring the effect of microdosing psychedelics on creativity in an open-label natural setting. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2018 Dec;235(12):3401-3413.
