Psychedelics, creativity and seeing things differently
What happens when the mind stops following its usual routes?
Across technology, science, music, art and culture, some extraordinarily creative people have spoken openly about psychedelic experiences and the effect those experiences had on the way they thought, created, solved problems or understood the world around them.
Their experiences are, of course, their own. But there is a fascinating thread running through many of them: seeing familiar things from an unfamiliar angle.
Here are some of our favourites.
Steve Jobs
Co-founder of Apple
“It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money.”
Jobs was speaking about his experiences with LSD, which he described as profoundly significant in his life. For him, the experience appears to have been less about escaping reality and more about reconsidering what he wanted to contribute to it.
Kary Mullis
Nobel Prize-winning chemist and inventor of PCR
“I found it to be a mind-opening experience. It was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took.”
Mullis developed the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, a technique that transformed molecular biology and earned him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spoke openly about his experiences with LSD and the importance he placed on them intellectually.
Michael Pollan
Author and journalist
“Psychedelics disrupt the grooves of habit and habitual thought.”
That idea gets remarkably close to the heart of the conversation around psychedelics and creativity. Creativity often requires us to stop producing the obvious answer and find another route through the problem. Pollan has spent years investigating psychedelic science, consciousness and the way our minds construct reality.
Robin Carhart-Harris
Neuroscientist and psychedelic researcher
“We give up… our ability to be open to surprises, our ability to think flexibly.”
Carhart-Harris was describing what can happen as the adult brain becomes increasingly ordered, predictable and governed by established ways of thinking. His research has explored whether psychedelics can temporarily loosen some of those rigid patterns.
Perhaps there is something rather wonderful in the phrase “open to surprises”.
Albert Hofmann
Chemist who first synthesised LSD
“It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation.”
Hofmann discovered LSD’s psychedelic effects in the 1940s and continued to argue for its careful, considered use throughout his life.
Stewart Brand
Technology pioneer and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog
“Good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.”
Brand actually wrote this about the emerging world of personal computing in 1972.
It is a tiny quote with a huge amount of history behind it. Brand sat at the unusual meeting point between the 1960s counterculture and the emerging technology industry. His Whole Earth Catalog became hugely influential within both movements, and he later became involved in some of the earliest online communities.
There is an even better story.
In 1966, Brand took LSD on a rooftop in San Francisco and began thinking about the curvature of the Earth. He wondered why nobody had released an image showing the entire planet from space. He began publicly campaigning for NASA to release one.
The resulting image became deeply associated with the environmental movement and the Whole Earth Catalog.
Sometimes a different perspective begins with a very literal change in perspective.
Harry Styles
Musician
While talking about using mushrooms during the making of Fine Line, Styles described them as helping him:“be fun and be creative”
It is perhaps the least academic explanation on this page. It may also be one of the most understandable.
Jon Hopkins
Musician and electronic producer
Hopkins has described some of his psychedelic experiences as:“crazy cosmic experiences”
Those experiences became a major source of inspiration for his music, including work structured around the build, peak and release of a psychedelic journey.
Creativity does not always arrive as a neatly articulated insight. Sometimes it arrives as something you later have to find a way to translate into sound, colour, words or movement.
Carlos Santana
Musician
“LSD - and I’m not promoting it - can help you claim your light, in a tangible way.”
Santana's qualification matters. He has also spoken about creativity and transcendence coming from within rather than depending on drugs. His view of psychedelics sits within a much broader philosophy of spirituality, music and human connection.
And sometimes the researchers heard it too
During early research into psychedelics and creative problem solving, one participant described what happened when approaching a problem:
“I decided to drop my old line of thinking and give it a new try.”
It is difficult to imagine a better description of creative thinking.
The original research explored whether psychedelic experiences could help people become “unstuck” when tackling genuine professional, scientific and technical problems.
So, do psychedelics make people more creative?
This is where things become more interesting than a simple yes or no.
People have reported extraordinary creative experiences with psychedelics for decades, but feeling more creative and producing measurably better creative work are not necessarily the same thing.
Research remains developing and sometimes contradictory.
A large 2026 study involving 5,905 participants found that people with previous psychedelic experience performed significantly better on a measure of divergent thinking, the ability to generate multiple different possibilities or solutions. However, they did not perform better on measures of insight or insight accuracy, and the observational study cannot show that psychedelics caused the difference.
Brain-imaging research has also found that the psychedelic state can be associated with a broader repertoire of brain connectivity states and what researchers describe as unconstrained or hyper-associative cognition.
Perhaps the most interesting question, then, is not whether psychedelics somehow give us creativity.
It is what can happen when our usual assumptions, associations and well-worn routes of thought become a little less fixed.
When we become more open to surprise.
When we look at something we have seen a hundred times before and, briefly, see something else.
