Drugs and Creativity

Creativity has often been looked as a way to fuel society. With the idea of new innovations and technology, creativity is often looked upon as a viable asset to many industries. One huge industry that has flourished due to the creative minds is the industry of the arts: the paintings, music, and literature that has inspired and continues to inspire society today. But many have criticized the art industry of “promoting” drugs in order to illicit creative behavior. This is seen through the countless achievements of artists today who admit to the use of drugs and credit drugs as the source of creativity. So the question arises: Are drugs a useful inducer of creative thought?

            In Dr. Zabelina’s experiment, she sought to understand the role of attention in creative thought. By gathering a roomful of creative experts in music, literature, culinary skills, etc., she tested whether these experts were more capable to switch attention and focus on the larger picture, which is called the attentional flexibility hypothesis. In the end, her results showed that creative people were in fact less capable of attention flexibility. They were slower at changing their attention between varying stimuli, and were often attention persistent, where they focused on a stimuli very attentively. This shows the attentiveness many artists display when creating a creative piece.

            In Creativity, Madness and Drugs, by R. Douglas Fields, he notes the power of the drugs and mental disorders to illicit creative thoughts. He notes writers like Edgar Allen Poe who suffered from bipolar disorder, or Van Gogh who suffered from borderline personality, and questions if they would have been able to produce creative works had they been treated for their respective mental illness. While he lauds their ability to produce such creative works in spite of their suffering from mental diseases, he is worried about artists who use drugs to inspire their mind. Artists such as The Beatles and Graham Nash have confessed to the use of drugs such as LSD, cocaine, and methamphetamines to help in writing the music. Nash talked about how drugs opened his mind up emotionally and was able to focus on writing music that was important. However, Fields is worried about the consumption of drugs to achieve state of madness as they have ill effects that cause many to suffer and die from. Drug addiction has become a problem in the art industry as actors, and musicians have acquired the use of drugs to achieve “transcendent” thoughts and a persistent attention to mold their craft. Dr. Zabelina shows evidence that persistent attention does lead to more creative ideas, and can explain why many artists use drugs to induce high activity of the brain in attention, emotion, etc. However, the article Creativity, Madness and Drugs ask us to think whether creative success is incentive enough to require the need of drugs. As we grasp a better understanding of how the brain works to help creativity, we will seek to learn more about the effects of the drugs in inducing creative behavior and the ethical issues that surround it.

Zabelina, D., Beeman, M. (2013) Short-term attentional perseveration associated with real-life creative achievement. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1-8

Fields, D. R. (November 22, 2013) Creativity, madness and drugs. Scientific American. Retrieved December 10, 2014. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/11/22/creativity-madness-and-drugs/