The paper delves into how psychedelics amplify the perception of meaning, possibly explaining their reported effects on therapeutic processes, creativity, and mystical experiences. It also examines the potential mechanisms behind these effects and discusses their broader social and public-health implications, along with suggestions for advancing scientific understanding in this area.
This paper explores the Janusian process in scientific creativity, a four-phase model (motivation, deviation, simultaneous opposition, and construction) where scientists actively engage with and resolve contradictory concepts, demonstrating that embracing paradoxes is key to generating novel and valuable scientific advancements.
The article proposes that insight, the experience of a sudden and often transformative understanding, is a core cognitive process that underlies various phenomena across different fields of study, including problem-solving, meditation, psychotherapy, the emergence of delusions, and the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. The authors argue that insight involves the restructuring of existing knowledge structures and the formation of new connections, leading to novel solutions, beliefs, or understandings, often accompanied by a distinct phenomenological and affective component. They advocate for an integrated approach to insight research that bridges the gap between different disciplines and inspires further exploration of this central process of human cognition.
This article proposes that philosophers, with their expertise in critical thinking and conceptualization, can play a valuable role in psychedelic-assisted therapy by helping patients navigate the complex philosophical and existential questions that may arise during these experiences.
This study is the first to quantitatively investigate the effects of microdosing psychedelics on creativity. It found that microdosing truffles, which contain psilocybin, improved both convergent and divergent thinking without affecting fluid intelligence, suggesting the potential of microdosing psychedelics as cognitive enhancers.
This study provides detailed insights into how psilocybin affects the human brain, highlighting its potential to induce both acute and lasting changes in brain network organization. The findings contribute to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the subjective effects of psychedelics and their potential therapeutic applications.
This comprehensive review analyzes the current state of research on the acute cognitive effects of psychedelics, highlighting the need for more rigorous studies in naturalistic settings and across various doses to fully understand their potential therapeutic and transformative applications.
Researchers are exploring the connection between the psychedelics produced by fungi/flora and the endogenous psychedelics produced within the human body. These compounds, which share similar chemical structures, may play roles in protecting the brain, acting as neurotransmitters, and combating depression through the gut-brain axis.
A preliminary study exploring the impact of psychedelics on creative problem-solving in 27 professionally employed males found that, when administered in a structured setting with preparation, psychedelics appear to enhance creative problem-solving, especially during the “illumination phase.” The effects on increased creativity were observed to last for several weeks after the session.
A study using a double-blind, placebo-controlled design showed that psilocybin can differentially affect creative thinking, with an immediate increase in spontaneous creative insights but a decrease in task-based creativity, and a rise in novel ideas seven days later. This change in creativity is linked to connectivity within the default mode network, as shown by ultrahigh field multimodal brain imaging, suggesting psychedelics may be a useful tool to explore creativity and its underlying neural mechanisms.
