The Associations of Naturalistic Classic Psychedelic Use, Mystical Experience, and Creative Problem Solving

Creative cognition is of broad interest and has been explored with cognitive, behavioural, and pharmacologic approaches. Earlier research shows mixed results for stimulant and alcohol effects on creativity, and findings for cannabis and classic psychedelics (such as DMT, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin) are equivocal but sometimes promising. Classic psychedelics produce altered self-awareness and mystical-type experiences characterised by awe, ineffability, and feelings of unity, and contemporary clinical studies often link therapeutic benefits to the intensity of psychedelic-occasioned mystical experience. Because modern psychedelic-assisted therapies typically aim to maximise mystical experience, understanding whether mystical experience mediates any enhancement in creativity would inform how interventions should be designed. This study, by Sweat and colleagues, tested whether naturalistic classic psychedelic use is associated with improved creative problem-solving ability and whether any such association is mediated by lifetime mystical experience. The investigators hypothesised that psychedelic use would relate to greater lifetime mystical experience, which in turn would predict better performance on a functional fixedness task (Duncker’s Candle Problem). The study uses a naturalistic, non-randomised design to probe these associations in a sample drawn from a university and local community.

Participants were recruited from a regional university student body and the local community in the southeastern United States via flyers and social media. Inclusion was limited to adults aged 18 years and older; no other eligibility criteria were specified. The university Institutional Review Board approved the study. Initial enrollment was 84 participants; after exclusions (14 who failed to complete the task and 2 with invalid data) the final analytic sample comprised 68 participants. Procedures occurred in an on-campus computer lab. After informed consent, participants completed questionnaires including the Hood Mysticism Scale (M Scale) and an open-ended prompt about the most memorable mystical experience, including whether religious practices or techniques such as drug use coincided with that experience. The M Scale is a 32-item self-report measure (16 positively and 16 negatively keyed items) scored on a 5-point scale from -2 to +2 and is widely used to assess lifetime mystical experience. Creativity was operationalised as functional fixedness and assessed with Duncker’s Candle Problem. Participants received a candle, a box of thumb tacks and matches and were instructed to attach the candle to a cork board so wax would not drip onto the floor; the timed solution involves using the box as a candle holder nailed to the wall. Two timing indices were recorded—latency to select the target object (dumping the tacks) and latency to completion—but because these were highly correlated (r = .93), only target selection latency was used in final analyses. The independent variable was self-reported classic psychedelic use concurrent with the memorable mystical experience, coded from the open-ended response as 0 = no classic psychedelic use, 1 = classic psychedelic use. Between-group demographic differences were examined with analyses of variance and chi-square tests. Mediation-analytic logic was followed: M Scale total scores and target selection latency were regressed on psychedelic-use status, and the indirect effect of psychedelic use on target selection latency via M Scale scores was tested using a bootstrap approach. Secondary analyses examined M Scale subscales (Interpretation, Introvertive, Extrovertive).

Of 84 initial participants, 14 failed to complete the functional fixedness task (failure unrelated to psychedelic-use status) and two provided invalid data, yielding N = 68. The sample had a mean age of 22.55 years (SD = 4.13), 44% were men, 75% were White, and mean education was 14.11 years (SD = 1.68). Eleven participants reported that their most memorable mystical experience occurred concurrently with classic psychedelic use; this grouping did not differ significantly from others on collected demographics. Participants who reported classic psychedelic use concurrent with a mystical experience (n = 11) showed significantly faster target selection latency on the functional fixedness task (M = 70.75 s, SD = 67.49) than participants not reporting such concurrent use (n = 57; M = 156.89 s, SD = 122.91), p = .02, Cohen’s d = -.87 (large effect). Those reporting psychedelic-concurrent mystical experiences also had higher lifetime mystical-experience scores on the M Scale (M = 136.27, SD = 14.18) than those not reporting psychedelic-concurrent mystical experiences (M = 118.03, SD = 23.68), p = .01, Cohen’s d = .93 (large effect). However, M Scale total scores were not associated with target selection latency (standardised β = -.06, p = .62), and the bootstrap test indicated that lifetime mystical experience did not significantly mediate the relationship between classic psychedelic use and functional fixedness performance (point estimate = -5.7; the extracted text does not clearly report the bias-corrected 95% confidence interval). Secondary analyses using M Scale subscales yielded similar non-mediation findings.

Sweat and colleagues interpret their findings as showing that naturalistic classic psychedelic use is associated with better performance on a creative problem-solving measure (functional fixedness), and with higher self-reported lifetime mystical experience, but that mystical experience does not mediate the relationship between psychedelic use and creativity. This outcome contradicts the authors’ initial hypothesis and suggests that mechanisms other than mystical experience may underlie any psychedelic-related enhancement in creative problem solving. The investigators propose alternative explanations grounded in neuroscience: classic psychedelics may transiently increase neural plasticity and alter functional connectivity—permitting novel communication between brain regions that do not normally interact and reducing connectivity between regions that typically do. Such changes, including effects on the Default Mode Network and Task Positive Network, could facilitate perspective shifts and less rigid thinking that benefit creative problem solving. The authors note parallels between psychedelic effects and some religious or meditative practices that can change frontal and parietal blood flow, suggesting shared ‘‘sub-mystical’’ mechanisms that are not specific to mystical phenomenology. Several limitations are acknowledged. The cross-sectional, correlational design and absence of drug administration or randomisation preclude causal inference. Durability of any observed enhancement cannot be determined because recency and patterns of psychedelic use were not assessed. Creativity was indexed by a single facet—functional fixedness—which limits generalisability to other aspects of creativity. The M Scale measured lifetime mystical experience rather than event-specific mystical intensity tied explicitly to a psychedelic episode, which may have reduced measurement specificity. Finally, the sample was small and comprised largely Western university students, which may affect generalisability. For future work the authors recommend larger and more diverse samples, randomised clinical trials with drug administration, measurement of personality and use patterns to disentangle selection effects from drug effects, follow-ups to characterise durability of effects, and inclusion of multiple creativity measures (for example, Alternate Uses and Einstellung tasks) to capture broader aspects of creative cognition.