Smoking Marijuana Increases Creativity---Maybe, Maybe Not

Smoking marijuana, aka Mary Jane, pot, or weed, can free your creative muse and enable you to produce a veritable masterpiece of art, music, or literature. Or can it? Being a former flower child of the 60's Revolution and someone who smoked her share of Mary Jane (Yes, I inhaled), I have often argued that a toke or two or three can indeed make you more creative. However, after conducting some research while compiling my book Color You Creative (available on Amazon Books), I have had to reconsider that argument. 

For starters, Jason Silva, of the Huffington Post (2011), relates that Jonah Lehrer, in his posts for Science Blogs, discusses the relationship between creativity and smoking marijuana, citing a paper published in Psychiatry Research, which “sheds some light on why smoking weed seems to unleash a stream of loose associations,” resulting in increased creativity (para. 11). Apparently, according to Lehrer, creativity increases because “smoking marijuana contributes to “a phenomenon called ‘semantic priming’” (Silva, 2011, para.11).

What exactly is semantic priming? According to Lehrer, “The activation of one word allows us to react more quickly to related words;” and, interestingly, “marijuana seems to induce a state of hyper-priming, in which the reach of semantic priming extends outwards to distantly related concepts” Silva, 2011, para. 12).

In other words, smoking marijuana, according to researcher Vaughan Bell, as cited by Lehrer, causes one to experience “freewheeling thoughts,” and in the study, “volunteers who were under the influence of cannabis showed a definite "hyper-priming" tendency, where distant concepts were reacted to more quickly” (Silva, 2011, para. 13).

As Silva relates (2011),

·    "Essentially, marijuana can extend the range of our free-associative capacities. It increases the novel ways in which we find connections between ideas, and it also extends the range of ideas that we might somehow relate to one another.

While not surprising, it does offer a scientific validation for what so many artists, philosophers and scientists have been saying for ages: that marijuana is a cognitive catalyst that can trigger heightened free-associative creativity, increased pattern recognition, and insight." (Para. 14-15)

On the other hand, various other studies have proposed a link between creativity and alcohol and/or drug usage, arguing that substances such as drugs and alcohol can contribute to or even cause creativity. After all, when one is under the influence of such substances, one is usually less inhibited and, therefore, less reserved about demonstrating one’s creative impulses. (Dacey & Lennon, 1998)

In conclusion, although some theorists argue there is often a correlation between addictive behavior and creativity, studies have not supported that argument. Therefore, one might very well conclude that whereas marijuana, like alcohol and drugs, can very well act as a catalyst for creativity, since it “frees” one’s thoughts and lessens one’s inhibitions, the product itself does not actually cause one to be any more or, for that matter, less creative than one naturally is. 

Dacey, J., Lennon, K. (1998) Understanding creativity: The interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Silva, J. (2011) On creativity, marijuana and "a butterfly effect in thought". Retrieved from  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-silva/on-creativity-marijuana-a_b_900701.html