Facilitating real-life creative insight through psychedelic virtual reality

A psychedelic virtual reality environment, which replicates visual content experienced under the influence of psychedelics, helped people stuck on a real-life creative problem reach new insights more effectively than a control VR environment. The thematic analysis indicated that the psychedelic VR supported several aspects of creative insight, likely by relaxing the person's fixed assumptions about their problem. The results are encouraging but need to be tested in larger studies.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The goal of the present work was to study the potential of facilitating creative insight in a real-life setting. To that end, participants were recruited who were struggling with a creative problem and had reached an impasse. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that solutions might be facilitated through virtual reality that replicates visual content experienced under the influence of psychedelics. Psychedelic visual experiences might support creative insight by relaxing the priors and constraints the person has about their creative problem. To test this idea, we tested a psychedelic virtual reality (VR) and developed a novel VR control environment. We observed that qualitatively psychedelic VR was more useful for eliciting creative insights than the control. We provide a thematic analysis demonstrating that psychedelic VR supported several aspects of creative insight. Taken together, we tested a novel method of psychedelic virtual reality to enhance creativity in real-life settings and observed encouraging results, which need to be investigated in larger studies.