Spontaneous and Deliberate Creative Cognition During and After Psilocybin Exposure

A study using a double-blind, placebo-controlled design showed that psilocybin can differentially affect creative thinking, with an immediate increase in spontaneous creative insights but a decrease in task-based creativity, and a rise in novel ideas seven days later. This change in creativity is linked to connectivity within the default mode network, as shown by ultrahigh field multimodal brain imaging, suggesting psychedelics may be a useful tool to explore creativity and its underlying neural mechanisms.