[ExI] Drugs and creativity/was Re: Religious Idiocy Triumphs Over Science Yet Again

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Dec 15, 2015, at 7:34 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 4:40 AM, Max More <max at maxmore.com> wrote:
>> Adrian: It's hard for me to assess your dismissive claim about insights while under the influence of drugs, partly because it's not clear to me whether you are talking about one or two drugs that you are most familiar with, or all drugs. (There are *hundreds* of mind-altering drugs, if not thousands, that we already know of.) 
>> 
>> These days, I have too many and too consistent and persistent responsibilities to experiment with major mind-altering substances. In my 20s and early 30s, however, I became very "experienced" (in the Jim Morrison sense). Back in April 1989, I wrote a (now) slightly embarrassing and over-enthusiastic piece called "Psychedelics and Mind Expansion", published in Extropy #3. (Good luck googling that. Pre-Web!) I'm pretty sure that you are *mostly* correct. I do recall two separate LSD experiences. In one, I "realized" that the core of reality is unity. In another, I "realized" that the core of reality is duality. 
>> 
>> On the other hand, I can say for sure that LSD enabled me to experience things (music, interactions with people, and interactions with nature) in ways I never had before, and that have continued to have (positive if occasional) effects since. For instance, I found myself (contrary to my then-highly reserved nature) talking to and *seeing* people like the postman and a grocery store clerk in ways that I never had before. In addition, while I would not recommend over-indulgence with THC, I have no doubt that it enabled me to overcome some deep-rooted emotional blockages that led me to talk to someone very close to me about a critical issue that I never been able to broach before. (Again, this was late-1980s/early 90s.) That opening up has had long-lasting benefits. 
>> 
>> So, I think your comments are mostly but not entirely true. We may be able to gain more value (apart from simple enjoyment/joy/engagement -- also worthy outcomes) from mind-altering drugs if we (a) could design them with greater specificity, and (b) had a much better understanding of how they would affect any specific individual. 
>> 
>> On the latter: Many people apparently have wonderfully enjoyable experiences on MDMA (unless they overdose or combine in stupid ways). I did not. In fact, I had some truly emotionally horrible experiences on the few occasions that I tried it. (Was it the substance? Was it the time in my life? I don't know.) That's interesting, because my LSD experiences were almost all good to fantastically great, with only one or two not-good (but not bad) occasions. (I think the least enjoyable was going to a Grateful Dead concert in LA -- I was not familiar with their music -- at a time when I really wasn't in a good mood.) 
>> 
>> I'm surprised I'm commenting at this length... The topic takes me back. [Not a flashback!] 
> 
> ​If you have not had any experience with Attribution Theory, in my area of social psychology, look into it a bit.  There appear to be numerous ways in which we can go wrong in assessing the personalities and intentions of other people we observe.​ ​  Then there's self-attribution: the many ways in which what we attribute our own actions and thoughts to can become irrational or just plain wrong.  We look for causes for our own behaviors as well as the behaviors of others and can make the same mistakes. Also look into state-dependent memory​:  the ability to recall correctly a memory can heavily depend on the chemical state of your brain when the memory was implanted.  Example:  the best time to remember a dream is either immediately when you wake up, or when you are going to sleep the next night - your brain is returning to the state when the experience happened.  Can't remember what happened when you were drunk?  Get drunk again and try.
> 
> So - trying to recall just what you thought or even did when your brain is in a very different state than normal, becomes a problem at the very least.  You are adding to the usual problems of memory recall, which are legion.  (I won't ask you to Google these, as they are just too numerous to take in)

Why not look at studies where creativity or some other trait was measured other than by self-reporting? For instance, Google on 'drugs and creativity' and you get, for instance:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychology-masala/201204/cannabis-and-creativity

> ​Now I am not contradicting Max or anyone else.  I am just saying that there are huge problems here of making sense of everyday experience, much less experiences on drugs (or even 'normal' highs), and even more problematic when you try to piece together events of years past.  The memory changes every time you recall it.  Ever go to a high school reunion and argue about who did what to whom and why?  It's a laugh.
> 
> All of these things are proved in hundreds of studies.​ 
> 
> ​Could it have been?  Yes.  It also could have been something entirely different.

I think this is an active area of research. There's also the issue that the brain, when it's being creative, must be doing something chemically and that that might be modified -- altered or enhanced -- by chemicals. (This is presuming the conventional neurological model of the mind and its features being brain-based.)

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20151215/55707e5d/attachment.html>