Psychedelics as Catalysts for Scientific Creativity

While the impact of psychedelics on creative expressions such as music, art, fashion, literature, cinema, television, architecture, and graphic design is acknowledged in some circles, their influence on creativity in the sciences through kindling inspiration and insight tends to be more overlooked. While people may intuitively link creativity to the arts, it may be less commonly linked to scientific endeavours, which it nonetheless forms a fundamental, if perhaps neglected, part of.

What is Scientific Creativity?

Creativity is complex and multifaceted, and not particularly easy to define or measure. However, it has been defined as the creation of ideas or objects considered novel and in some way valuable or useful. It is considered among the most important and highly valued of human traits, and an integral aspect of the sciences. Deeply entwined with creativity is inspiration, which is often what sparks it. It is a motivational state that compels individuals to bring ideas into fruition, another important aspect of scientific enquiry.

While artistic and scientific creativity overlap, scientific creativity tends to encompass problem-solving, often involving the expansion of knowledge in a given domain. There is also a tendency for scientific creativity to be more externally applied, whereas artistic creativity may be more introspectively oriented. It tends to be more concerned with the generation of new representations of life or feelings, or seeks to transform the thoughts, principles, and materials of both the artist and their audience.

The Vital Role of Scientific Creativity

Some have argued that the sciences would benefit from greater creativity and that facilitating insight and the generation of new ideas could aid scientific advancement. Imagination is also considered an important aspect of creativity, considered vital for scientific inquiry and research by highly influential scientific figures such as Albert Einstein.

Humanity is likely to face immense challenges in the decades to come. Our ability to foster scientific creativity to innovate and problem solve will play a vital role in ensuring we can meet these societal challenges. Given the centrality of science to human progress, prioritising the development of a culture that consciously facilitates ways of catalysing creativity could yield wide-scale societal benefits.

The Importance of Altered States to Scientific Advancement

Altered states have been credited with catalysing some pivotal scientific breakthroughs. Dream breakthroughs have been credited with helping cement the concept of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of chemical elements, which has been described as chemistry's most important breakthrough. Dreams also played a role in Nobel Prize-winning chemist Alfred Werner's important contribution to the field of inorganic chemistry and the work of Nobel Prize-winning pharmacologist and psychobiologist Otto Loewi, which would constitute a very important step towards establishing the field of neuroscience.

A hypnagogic reverie of the ouroboros gifted chemist August Kekulé with an insight into the cyclic structure of benzene, this having been described as the “most brilliant piece of scientific prediction to be found in the whole of organic chemistry.”

Dreams and hypnagogic states share overlap with psychedelic states, which have been described as dreamlike subjective experiences. These altered states can potentially catalyse creativity through shifting the modes of creative thinking associated with it.

Modes of Creative Thinking

Creative thinking has been conceptualised in a number of ways, including divergent thinking (associated with the process of generating multiple potential solutions to a problem) and convergent thinking (associated with the process of coming up with a single concrete solution to a problem).

It has also been defined as dual thinking, or as analytical and synthetic thinking. Analytical thinking is associated with breaking down a concept into its component parts while systematically seeking a single viable solution to a problem. It can be considered the modus operandi of the scientist, being logical, linear, deductive, and tending to occur incrementally. It facilitates the comparison of new concepts against pre-existing ones, making it very useful for error detection.

Synthetic thinking is a more dynamic thought process, associated with combining multiple components into a coherent whole and seeking patterns across these component parts. It has been associated with the occurrence of sudden insight, whereby “previously unseen and unexpected connections suddenly reveal themselves to the mind.”

The creative process has been defined as occurring in distinct phases, including preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Fluid and flexible cognitive processes and a plastic, dynamic mind state have been highlighted as being fundamental to problem solving and creative ability. Creativity does not happen in a vacuum, and requires underlying knowledge, motivation, interest and engagement.

How Altered States Can Influence Modes of Creative Thinking

The dream, hypnagogic, and psychedelic states are associated with enhanced capacity for mental imagery and visualisation, and all are associated with more fluid, unconstrained, imagistic, and hyperassociative states of consciousness.

However, while recall of content from dream and hypnagogic states can be harnessed with practice, amnesia is associated with both, which may make recall of insights challenging. One suggested benefit of the hypnagogic state over dreaming is the capacity for hallucinatory images to be critically examined before the eyes.

Benefits of Psychedelics Over Dreams and Hypnagogia

The capacity for images to be critically examined before the eyes is a quality shared by both hypnagogic and psychedelic states. However, the psychedelic state provides access to a much less fleeting and more sustained altered state experience in which amnesia may be less of an issue.

Psychedelic states are also associated with greater meta-cognitive awareness than the dream state, in which the dreamer is cut off from reality, with a lack of contextual awareness of where one is and what one is doing. (The lucid dream state is a different matter, where greater levels of awareness and clarity of consciousness are retained). In the psychedelic state, one has one foot in the psychedelic realm, the other (usually) on terra firma.

Psychedelics induce states of heightened connectivity across different brain regions. Individuals possessing high levels of scientific and artistic creativity have been found to express similar heightened whole-brain connectivity across brain networks.

Psychedelics also have the capacity to relax prior beliefs and expectations we have about the world, allowing us to look at things with fresh eyes and from new perspectives. Preconceptions may be a barrier to the creative process in the sciences, so being temporarily unencumbered from past associations may liberate creative thinking from the tendency to perceive more obvious associations. The novelty tied to creativity will not be arrived at through traversing already well-trodden pathways of the mind.

Dosage of Psychedelic

The dosage of psychedelic ingested is also likely an important factor when considering their potential as creativity catalysts. Low to moderate doses may promote an advantageous loosening of higher-order cognitive functions and inhibitions, enhancement of visualisation skills, and access to the subconscious, coupled with some level of cognitive control where the ability to judge the validity and usefulness of novel ideas is retained. While more conducive to the generation of deep existential insights, the higher dosages used in modern clinical studies may impair cognitive processing and yield effects likely to be too distracting for this applied context.

One pilot study tested a range of LSD dosages (50, 75, and 100 micrograms), with the investigators settling on 75 micrograms as the optimal “goldilocks dosage”, which was then used in a follow-up study where LSD was administered to scientists and engineers with the aim of facilitating scientific problem solving.

Psychedelics and Pluralistic Perspectivism

The scientific method emphasises an objective detachment when engaging with one’s object of study, and to avoid becoming entwined with it. In stark contrast to this scientific approach to achieving greater understanding, a shamanic approach emphasises the inverse; rather than remaining detached from one’s object of study, one becomes that which they wish to learn about, through mental shape shifting or transmogrification in an altered state of consciousness.

Such radical shifts in perspective crop up in a number of scientists’ accounts of obtaining insight when in a psychedelic or other altered state. The state of detachment that underpins the scientific process isn’t going anywhere; however, by providing the potential for a plurality of perspectives, the psychedelic state may yield a fertile ground for the generation of new insights or the perception of problems from new angles.

Psychedelics, Openness, and Creativity

One enduring effect of psychedelics on creativity could be their impact on a particular aspect of personality, openness to experience. Experience with psychedelics such as psilocybin has been shown to enhance openness in an enduring way (which may be elicited by the mystical experiences they are associated with). In addition to being associated with an interest in science, it is strongly associated with creativity and is the personality trait most strongly associated with scientific creativity. Openness is also associated with cognitive ability, fluid intelligence (associated with the ability to think abstractly and solve problems), imagination, intellectual curiosity and engagement, an increased hunger for knowledge, and permeability to new ideas and experiences.

Project Outsight

Aldous Huxley, in tandem with psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (who first coined the term ‘psychedelic’) and neuropsychologist John Smythies, concocted a plan to dose some of the leading intellectuals of the day with mescaline with the intent of “changing the intellectual climate”. Potential participants included various luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Carl Jung, as well as a range of philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and polymaths. This research project, named ‘Outsight’, has been described by philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes as “the greatest thing that never happened in psychedelia,” with plans ultimately being shelved due to no funding being awarded, which was blamed by the organisers on the “stuffy reductivism” of the time.

Research on Creative Professionals in the 1960s

One innovative and interesting study undertaken in the mid ’60s made a compelling addition to research exploring the potential of psychedelics to influence applied creativity. This study was notable in that, rather than trying to assess creativity solely via psychometric scales, it used professional creatives who were grappling with creative problems as part of their work. These individuals were intellectually and emotionally involved with their creative tasks and motivated to find solutions, having already put a lot of work in during their sober waking lives.

The study recruited 27 creatives working in a range of fields, including engineering, physics, theoretical mathematics, architecture, commercial art, and furniture design. Participants were dosed with a modest 200mg of mescaline. Many participants attempted to find a creative solution to more than one problem, and follow-up assessments revealed that six solutions were accepted for production or construction, 10 partial solutions were being developed or further applied, and 20 new avenues for investigation were opened up, with 4 reports of no solution obtained.

A number of participants reported sustained benefits that they attributed to the experience relating to their creative ability and work performance, with no deficits reported. This was one of the last legally sanctioned psychedelic studies of the 1960s, before all psychedelic research was shut down by the US Food and Drug Administration, halting all scientific progress in this area for decades.

Assessment of the qualitative accounts of the trial’s participants revealed that all felt the drug had subjectively enhanced their creative process, and revealed 11 core themes pertaining to ‘Strategies of Enhanced Functioning’. These included enhanced fluency and mental flexibility; superior visualising capacity; heightened motivation, empathy, concentration, and access to the subconscious; reduced inhibition and anxiety; and an improved association of dissimilar ideas and capacity to restructure problems in a wider context.

Following in the footsteps of this trial, a study has been conducted in modern times exploring the effect of LSD on the problem-solving abilities of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, with results forthcoming.

Examples of How Psychedelics Have Facilitated Scientific Insight

Psychedelics have been credited with catalysing scientific insight in a number of domains, including computing, biochemistry, molecular biology, ecology, pharmacology, neurology, mathematics, and theoretical physics.

Development of PCR

Biochemist Kary Mullis considers his use of LSD to have played an important role in his discovery of a means to automate the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a way of amplifying small DNA segments. Notably, Mullis’s breakthrough came not while under the influence of LSD, but subsequent to its usage, suggesting a more enduring change in cognition or creativity. This was a breakthrough for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. PCR has been described as “one of the most valuable techniques currently used in bioscience, diagnostics and forensic science”, and by allowing the rapid diagnosis of diseases, can facilitate timely treatment, which in turn has saved many lives. In his words:

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…I’ve learned that partially I would think, and this is again my opinion, through psychedelic drugs…if I had not taken LSD ever would I have still been in PCR? I don't know, I doubt it, I seriously doubt it.

Psychedelic Computing

Psychedelics appear to have had a notable influence on computing, credited with enhancing creativity and contributing to computer programming and software development. LSD has been credited with contributing to the design of the first computer circuit chips by early Silicon Valley computer engineers, before they could be designed on computers, with these consisting of very complex three-dimensional structures that had to be held in the head of those designing them. LSD has also been credited with playing a role in the formation of quantum encryption, helping ignite the multi-billion-dollar research field of quantum information science. Computer programmer Dennis Wier credits LSD with assisting him in the development of a compiler for an application language known as MARLAN. The system was made up of approximately eight hundred subroutines, which made it hard for him to hold the entirety of the system in his mind at the same time. While at cruising altitude under 75 micrograms of LSD, he felt he was able to achieve this, which allowed him to detect inconsistencies that he was able to amend. The system was a commercial success for his employer and was used for many years by them. He didn’t go public with his usage of LSD until over three decades later.

Others credit psychedelics with assisting in computer programming and software development. Kevin Herbert credited psychedelics with helping him overcome creative blocks and complex problems, and aiding him in finding technical solutions. Of his experience with LSD, he stated: “It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used”.

Adam Wiggins felt psychedelics aided him in the development of a cloud platform service supporting several programming languages. Bill Atkinson credits an LSD experience under a starlit sky with the desire to link things together, spurring his development of the software application HyperCard for Apple, it being among the first successful hypermedia systems, predating the World Wide Web.

Noteworthy computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart was administered LSD as part of a study conducted by the International Foundation of Advanced Study (IFAS) investigating how psychedelics might influence creativity. He went on to introduce a score of major technical innovations, including the computer mouse. Apple founder Steve Jobs felt that LSD had played a pivotal and transformative role in his life and work, describing taking LSD “as one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life”. It is possible that psychedelics have had more influence on the field of computing than is currently publicly known.

A Psychedelic Scientific Pix and Mix Bag

Psychedelics have been credited with eliciting insights or igniting inspiration across a broad swath of the sciences. Mathematician Ralph Abraham credits psychedelics with impacting domains of mathematics such as chaos theory and fractal geometry, while neurologist Andrew Lees credits ayahuasca with helping to break down rigid thinking that was blocking innovation in Parkinson’s disease research.Self-experimentation with LSD by British pharmacologist Sir John Gaddum contributed to his postulation that serotonin might play a role in mood regulation, an important contribution to the emerging field of psychopharmacology at the time. The pharmacologist and chemist Alexander Shulgin credits his first psychedelic experience with “unquestionably confirming the entire direction” of his life.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli credits his experiences with LSD as being personally and intellectually stimulating, seemingly dissolving the passage of time. This ignited his interest in physics, and the subject of time in particular, propelling him into a career in theoretical physics and his academic study of quantum gravity. LSD was also utilised as a creativity-enhancing tool by the Berkeley-based Fundamental Fysiks Group, who helped revive interest in Bell’s theorem, which was neglected by mainstream physics at the time.

Ecologist Monica Gagliano credits ayahuasca and other altered states with contributing to her research work on plant intelligence. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby accompanied three molecular biologists to the Amazon where they all participated in ayahuasca ceremonies supervised by an Indigenous shaman, with all three scientists reporting that they felt they had obtained visionary insight relating to their work perceived as being useful and relevant, and all felt further work exploring the potential of ayahuasca as an adjunct to research was warranted.

Psychedelics played an important role in the conception of the highly ambitious and influential, if controversial, Biosphere 2 in Arizona, comprising the largest closed ecological system ever created. It was intended to assess the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space as a substitute for Earth's biosphere. John Allen credits psychedelics with helping him concoct the concept of Biosphere 2, while Mark Van Thilo’s experience with psychedelics inspired him to want to bridge ecology and technology, which led to his work on construction quality control, and then the maintenance and operation of all technical equipment of Biosphere 2.

Self-experimentation with psychedelics by researchers likely played an important and largely undocumented role in the first wave of mainstream psychiatric research from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and some modern researchers credit self-experimentation as being helpful for the development of research questions pertaining to the psychological effects of the substances. Other clinicians feel their experiences with psychedelics have enriched their self-awareness and understanding of those afflicted with mental health disorders. A life-changing experience with LSD would shift the career trajectory of psychologist Kenneth Ring, who would go on to become a pioneering researcher of near-death experiences.

LSD has been credited with playing a role in the discovery of the structure of DNA through self-experimentation by Francis Crick. While Crick was acquainted with LSD and appreciated its effects, it isn’t likely that he was acquainted with it prior to his groundbreaking work on DNA. Its role in the latter discovery was neither confirmed nor denied by him, with it taking place in 1953, at a time when LSD was only a decade old, and a rare and little-known substance outside of select psychiatric circles.

Although these anecdotes are not evidence that psychedelics systematically induce a state of heightened creativity conducive to scientific insight, they seem to indicate that, under certain circumstances, they can.

LSD-Inspired Redesign of a Psychiatric Hospital

Japanese Canadian architect Kiyo Izumi, in collaboration with Osmond and Canadian biochemist Abram Hoffer, used LSD to help him design a better psychiatric hospital. He hoped that the LSD would help him better understand and empathise with patients with illnesses such as schizophrenia who experienced reality differently. By placing himself in a more sensitive and vulnerable state under the LSD, his intent was to better understand how a patient’s struggles may be amplified or impacted by different elements of the psychiatric institute setting. He took multiple trips while exploring a psychiatric hospital setting under the influence, supplementing these experiences with interviews with both patients and staff.Under the LSD, Izumo found the psychiatric hospital setting to be hostile and unwelcoming. There was no privacy, no sense of time due to a lack of clocks and calendars, cavernous utility closets yawned menacingly, beds were too high to place both feet firmly on the ground, and bars on the small windows engendered feelings of restrainment. The setting appeared to be acting to further isolate and negatively impact the patients.

His recommended design improvements included changes to the layout that would facilitate both more privacy and more capacity for social interaction, larger windows to let in more natural light and allow for better views of the surrounding nature, and obliquely angled bay windows in the patient rooms to avoid reflections at night. Controllable lighting and natural wood ceilings were recommended to contribute to a more inviting atmosphere. Non-ambiguous design elements were also emphasised, where it was made clear what the function of each object within a room was, and creating an environment that would engender feelings of safety, while allowing for the preservation of each patient's own individuality and identity was highlighted as important.

Izumo’s ideas would influence the construction of Yorkton Psychiatric Centre, and a number of psychiatric institutions in Canada and the US. Yorkton Psychiatric Centre would be awarded the 2025 Prix du XXe Siècle by the RAIC (Royal Architectural Institute of Canada) and the National Trust of Canada, which celebrates excellence and quality of design in 20th-century Canadian architecture.

A Psychedelic Window into the Origins of Life?

Psychedelic usage by scientists is very likely underreported, due to valid concerns over potential repercussions to personal and professional lives if illicit usage is revealed. One figure to come out of the psychedelic closet in recent years is multi-disciplinary scientist Bruce Damer. Having his first introduction to psychedelics via the mushroom, gifted to him by his friend Terrence McKenna, Bruce would go on to have an experience with ayahuasca, which would change his life and radically shift the focus of his work.His first experience with ayahuasca would catapult him on an evolutionary trip, running in reverse through time, to the origin of life. He shifted to himself as an unborn embryo, and then his mother’s egg and father’s sperm, shifting on a reverse course through his ancestry, the primitive primate line, early mammals, proto-mammals, and ground-crawling tetrapods which picked up tails and fins and slid back into the water from whence they came.

The experience shifted, and a volcanic planet with an alien, orange sky came into view, which Bruce took to be the Hadean Earth, 4 billion years ago. His awareness zoomed in on a series of steaming, interconnected pools, some being flushed by the jets of geysers. Engulfed by the waters of a steaming pool, his perspective zoomed into a molecular level. In his words:

I was in a new body composed of an undulating bag of bilayers of lipid membranes surrounding silvery molecular complexes. Zipper-lines of polymers conjoined in continuous movement made up my sinews and tissues. Before I could grok this at all, the sense of something ripping caused my vision to pivot. I came to focus on a fluid-filled sac tearing itself off from my undulating body. The connection to me pinched away and the sac floated into the distance, its interior black and seemingly dead. As the sac departed, my observer was drawn back to track a complex of polymers moving up and down like the keys of a piano played by an unseen hand. Somehow the tearing off of the sac and the player piano polymer were tied together by the scream. It was done, and I felt alive, or rather, my protocell body felt truly alive for the first time.

His experience led him to propose a scientific ‘hot spring’ hypothesis pertaining to the origin of life on this planet, developed in collaboration with his UC Santa Cruz colleague David Deamer, who helped him ground his visionary ideations into testable science in geochemical settings. This was featured on the covers of both Scientific American and Astrobiology. The hypothesis has provided a research frontier which is being actively explored by a dozen university teams worldwide.

The Center for MINDS

Inspired by his psychedelic-ignited insights, in addition to his application of the hypnagogic state, Bruce established the Center for MINDS, an acronym for Multidisciplinary Investigation into Novel Discoveries and Solutions. By acting as a grantmaking centre, it seeks to support the exploration of psychedelics and other altered states in the application of scientific creativity and problem-solving through research, practice groups, and protocol development. It will also serve as a community centre for those who pursue extraordinary “solutioning” through altered states, while also working towards providing a more formal environment for mentorship and training.

The Issue Posed by a Lack of Scientific Innovation and Breadth of Creative Thought

It has been argued that modern science has undervalued and neglected adventurous and associative modes of thinking, having a bias towards analytical thinking, and that it would benefit from the application of more fluid mind states and greater creativity more broadly. Facilitating insight and generating new ideas could aid scientific advancement, all the more important given a report published in Nature that suggests a slowdown in scientific innovation, evidenced by a decrease in disruptive patents and papers. This underscores an urgent need for fresh and innovative approaches and tools that can contribute to catalysing scientific creativity.

Future Pathways

Psychedelics are likely to be best applied as scientific creativity catalysts in a context of meaningful and emotional engagement with creative tasks (with accompanying knowledge and interest), and when prior in-depth focus and effort have already been directed towards the subject in question, or when a creative block is hampering progress. Used in this manner, psychedelics may help stimulate some aspects of scientific creativity and insight at the ‘illumination’ stage of the creative process. Future work could seek to build on past research and recruit scientific creatives working on applied tasks who may have hit an impasse and are struggling to progress. Independent assessment of creativity by experts in the relevant domains may safeguard against what has been referred to as the ‘illusion of insight’ (tied to the capacity of psychedelics to amplify a sense of meaningfulness), adding weight to the findings.

Ethnobotanist and psychedelic advocate Terrence McKenna once said of the psychedelic experience that “…the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas”, with psychedelics having been proposed to act as ideagens. The exploration of any avenues that may be able to yield flexible thinking and provide fertile terrain for the generation of creative insight and new ideas should be considered a matter of great importance for the future of humanity.

Current drug laws over much of the world severely restrict access to psychedelics, which means that some of the scientific insights or developments outlined here – including the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of PCR – were dependent on illicit activity. By restricting access to psychedelics, we could, in turn, be restricting access to helpful tools which could aid in scientific advancement when used with care and in the right context.