I feel that the approach taken here is rather lacking.
Firstly, any attempt to understand drug use in humans is going to be greatly hindered if one has not had a decent amount of experience with the drug(or similar drugs) in question.
Secondly, this article doesn’t seem to significantly differentiate between the effects, reasons and motivations for use and harms encountered of different kinds of drug use. There is obviously a huge difference between the art and drug use of Alex Grey or Simon Posford ( ayahuasca, DMT, various other extremely powerful tryptamines) and, say, a talented punk rocker who enjoys alcohol and cannabis primarily.
Drugs are a very, very deep subject and I don’t think it’s possible, at least with our current understanding of the brain, to productively speculate on creativity and drug use without 1) first hand knowledge of drugs and artistic creation 2) knowledge of academic literature regarding creative states, artistic talent, etc.
In the book The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide the 9th chapter extensively discusses the enhancement of creative capacities in people on LSD. The chapter contains an explanation of methodology, tabular data, and subjective user reports. The subjects were 26 professional men, including 16 engineers and a few mathematicians.
Edit: I found an appropriate article, an essay by the renowned visionary artist Alex Grey where he discusses entheogens(psychedelic compounds used in a particular way) and creativity. I suspect this article has more insight on drugs and the creative process than the contents of this LW discussion.
I feel that the approach taken here is rather lacking.
Firstly, any attempt to understand drug use in humans is going to be greatly hindered if one has not had a decent amount of experience with the drug(or similar drugs) in question.
Secondly, this article doesn’t seem to significantly differentiate between the effects, reasons and motivations for use and harms encountered of different kinds of drug use. There is obviously a huge difference between the art and drug use of Alex Grey or Simon Posford ( ayahuasca, DMT, various other extremely powerful tryptamines) and, say, a talented punk rocker who enjoys alcohol and cannabis primarily.
Drugs are a very, very deep subject and I don’t think it’s possible, at least with our current understanding of the brain, to productively speculate on creativity and drug use without 1) first hand knowledge of drugs and artistic creation 2) knowledge of academic literature regarding creative states, artistic talent, etc.
In the book The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide the 9th chapter extensively discusses the enhancement of creative capacities in people on LSD. The chapter contains an explanation of methodology, tabular data, and subjective user reports. The subjects were 26 professional men, including 16 engineers and a few mathematicians.
Edit: I found an appropriate article, an essay by the renowned visionary artist Alex Grey where he discusses entheogens(psychedelic compounds used in a particular way) and creativity. I suspect this article has more insight on drugs and the creative process than the contents of this LW discussion.
Article: http://alexgrey.com/media/writing/essays/the-creative-process-and-entheogens/