The Journal of Creative Behavior
December 1, 1999
Jos Ten Berge
51 citations
Language barriers have kept American scholars from learning about European studies on drugs and creativity conducted from the 1940s to the 1970s. An art historian reports on Swiss, English, French, and German studies offering new data in a research area banned since drugs like mescalin, psilocybin, and LSD became illegal. Different views of these drugs—revealed by terms like hallucinogens, psychotogenics, and psychedelics—colored researchers' aims. The notions of drugs dictating or liberating the intoxicated artist are criticized by discussing the importance of set and setting. Intentional drug use among artists expecting breakthroughs while intoxicated can be seen as a form of disinhibiting technique.
The Journal of Creative Behavior
December 24, 2024
Antoine Bellemare‐Pepin, Karim Jerbi
4 citations
Creativity relies not only on divergent thinking but also on perceptual flexibility, especially when engaging with ambiguous stimuli. The authors propose a framework linking creativity to perception through sensory affordances, highlighting pareidolia—seeing familiar patterns in noise—as a key mechanism for generating novel ideas. They introduce "divergent perception" to describe active engagement with ambiguous sensory information, suggesting this process may explain heightened creativity in psychedelic and psychotic states. The role of attention in this process is explored, and future research directions are outlined, including manipulating stimulus characteristics and examining interactions between bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes.
The Journal of Creative Behavior
June 17, 2024
Andrea Patti, Giuseppe Pierpaolo Merola, Davide Benedetti et al.
2 citations
Artists report higher levels of aberrant salience—the tendency to attribute unusual significance to stimuli—than both healthy controls and patients with psychosis. In a study of 196 healthy controls, 50 artists from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, and 84 outpatients diagnosed with psychosis, artists scored significantly higher on the Aberrant Salience Inventory. Group membership was the only factor influencing scores; age, gender, education, and antipsychotic treatment did not. The authors suggest that aberrant salience, rather than being solely a marker of pathology, may enhance creative faculties and unique perceptual experiences, and that education might help channel these mechanisms through art.