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Cannabis consumers often insisted that weed inspires their creativity and helps with concentration.
The Washington Post noted that a variety of well-known geniuses and luminaries have also endorsed this idea, including co-founder and CEO of Apple AAPL Steve Jobs who famously said weed made him feel “relaxed and creative.” Astronomer and author Carl Sagan also believed cannabis helps produce “serenity and insight.” And then there’s Tesla TSLA and Twitter CEO Elon Musk who has dabbled in the plant and generally expressed his approval. And let us not forget Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby who were outspoken on the importance cannabis played in their music and lives.
Despite these popular beliefs about the creative potency of cannabis, scientific consensus has remained hazy.
The Washington Post reported that new research suggests cannabis may not open the door to creativity after all.
“Almost everyone thinks that cannabis makes them more creative. And it seems like that assumption is not supported by the data,” said study author Christopher Barnes, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.
Cannabis Improves Mood But Not Necessarily Creativity
Researchers originally hypothesized that cannabis would indirectly increase creativity by making users feel more cheerful and relaxed.
To test this idea, they designed a randomized controlled trial with 107 volunteers who just consumed weed lightly and compared their creative outputs against those who had not.
For the control group, the researchers asked 84 other participants to do a task only if they had not used cannabis in the past 12 hours, presumably after the effects would have worn off.
For the creativity test, the participants were asked to consider a brick and generate as many creative uses as possible for it in four minutes.
As expected, participants under the influence were in a better mood and more jovial, which made them feel like their ideas were more creative than their not-stoned counterparts.
However, creativity assessments by third-party raters, who did not know who was under the influence, were a buzzkill, noted WaPo. When they rated the responses on novelty and usefulness, they did not see a difference in creativity.
Photo: Benziinga edit with Gleti and Stockbusters on Shutterstock
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