Out of the box: A psychedelic model to study the creative mind
Medical Hypotheses – March 23, 2018
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
Psilocybin, a potent hallucinogen, profoundly influences our psychology, enhancing creativity and flexible divergent thinking. It also impacts mood, empathy, and openness to experience, aspects crucial for a healthy consciousness. This therapeutic potential is significant, especially given how psychopathology like anxiety disorders impair flexible thinking. Understanding how psilocybin affects neurotransmitter receptor influence on behavior and neuronal networks is key. Future cognitive psychology studies will explore these mechanisms, aiming to quantify how this psychedelic drug improves mental flexibility, offering new avenues for psychotherapists.
Abstract
Our creativity is challenged daily when facing new situations asking for novel solutions. Creativity, a multicomponent construct includes flexible divergent and rigid convergent thinking. Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin can enhance creativity and affect state of mind (mood, empathy, openness). Of note, flexible thinking is disturbed in psychopathological conditions like anxiety disorders and depression and preliminary findings have shown psychedelics to be efficacious in the treatment of those conditions. The question how psychedelics induce this state of enhanced flexible thinking remains to be answered and investigating the neurobiology underlying this phenomenon will not only help in understanding why psychedelics are of use in the therapeutic setting but also in other settings where flexible thinking is challenged. A model including neuronal networks, neurotransmitters and personal factors playing a role in this process will be proposed which can be put to the test by means of placebo-controlled pharmaco-imaging studies in healthy volunteers.