A common reason for consuming psilocybin mushrooms is to seek creative insights and breakthroughs, or to generally enhance creative capacity.
Many people believe that creativity is a muscle. It may require practice to capture creative inspiration; mushrooms alone won’t turn you into a creative genius. Many people have found, however, that psilocybin mushrooms can potentially amplify already-established creative practices and fuel the desire to create. They can also lead to unexpected insights. These experiences won’t necessarily occur during the mushroom journey itself, but perhaps a few days after.
The Science of Using Mushrooms for Creativity
Research at Maastricht University1 has examined the phenomenon of mushrooms making people feel more creative. It suggests that the creativity sparked by psilocybin mushrooms follows from an increase in divergent thinking and occurs after a psychedelic experience, not during.
The study found that while mushrooms may increase the potential for spontaneous cognition (more bizarre, abstract thoughts), it decreases the potential for deliberative cognition (being able to meet the demands of a given task). In other words, mushrooms are disruptive to productive creativity — which the study’s authors defined as an imbalance between spontaneous and deliberative creative cognition — during a journey, even though most users reported feeling more creative. But the study’s authors noted that participants showed an increase in deliberative creative cognition one week after dosing.