Can You Hack Into Your Creativity?
What science says about using LSD and psilocybin–as well as drug-free ways — to expand your imagination
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Creativity is one of humanity’s greatest allures — and mysteries. Plato wrote of creation as divine inspiration, or the muse “breathing into” the creator. Schopenhauer saw creativity as an artist’s ability to “lose themselves” in their work. Nietzsche believed that creativity required a hint of madness — but also deep focus.
Creativity is largely viewed in the same way today. People talk about “flow,” “inspiration,” and even the elusive “muse.” But the new cultural contention is that creativity is something to be “hacked” into, as if your mind is a locked account and all you need is the password — in the form of psychedelics, dreaming, meditation, smart drugs, etc. — to crack it open.
But is creativity really something you can unlock? And beyond that, do people even know enough about creativity to know how to unlock it?
“Creativity, according to our understanding, is not one thing, but consists of many different phases and steps,” says Bernhard Hommel, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Leiden University in The Netherlands, whose research focuses on creativity and cognitive enhancement. “And if there are 500 people that all say, ‘I want to be more creative,’ my expectation would be that everyone has a different meaning of that.”
There are two basic modes of thinking associated with creativity: divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking is characterized as the ability to come up with as many solutions to a problem as possible and convergent thinking is the ability to solve problems with a single, correct solution. Each one serves an important purpose: divergent thinking, for example, is associated with “big, out-of-the-box ideas,” according to Hommel, and convergent thinking is responsible for choosing an idea you can actually run with and then getting you across the finish line. While divergent thinking could be the source of Plato’s muse, you also need convergent thinking to give you Nietzsche’s focus. But people are often better at one type of thinking or the other. “The problem is, if you find a drug that makes you better on A, it may very well make you worse on B,” Hommel says.
