March 23, 2005

Creativity/drugs From my email -- Literature and Little Pink Pills: Drugs and the Creativity Question.

Mind-altering drugs were considered by many 19th- and early 20th-century French (as well as other) artists to enhance artistic production. Opium, absinthe, hashish, cocaine, alcohol, and other drugs apparently primed the creative pumps of such writers as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, the Surrealists, Michaux, and Gide, to name just a few. On the other hand, modern psychotropic drugs such as Lithium, Valium, and Prozac have been charged with stifling artists' creativity: gone, the manic's creative binges; vanished, the depressive's existentialist ruminations; quelled, the paranoiac's eloquent rantings. While France has been and arguably still is one of the world's leading producers of great literature, it is also one of the world's leading consumers of legal psychotropic drugs. What might be the effects of this hyper-prescription of such drugs on a nation whose identity is so deeply tied to its literary production? Are French writers themselves writing about drugs today? Are there French equivalents of books such as Prozac Nation (Elizabeth Wurtzel, 1997) and Prozac Diary (Lauren Slater, 1999), which chronicle the supposed flattening of the author's personality and the stifling of his or her creativity? What are the French media saying about the phenomenon? Do they (or others) attribute it to the dreaded "Americanization" of France? What did these Valium- and Paxil-poppers' precursors have to say about their experiments with more old-fashioned drugs? If these writers had had access to the SSRIs and the MAOIs of today, would Madame Bovary have abstained from killing herself? Indeed, would she never have been born? Finally, could sex be considered an alternate kind of "creativity drug"? If so, has a modern disease (AIDS) had the same dampening effect on creativity as certain modern remedies (SSRIs)? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Opinions from any nation or on any national literature? I thought it a reasonable question.

posted by Wolof 19 years ago
  • I have to: while your statements are true, absinthe/coke/whatever also fueled the Creative Genius of a lot of boring hacks, as well as that guy at the bar who thinks he's brilliant and just won't shut up. And the eeeeeeeeeeeeevillle medicines have made life possible for a lot of people who would otherwise be dead, as well as making life more difficult for some. But sure, pile on with the absolutes, it's fun.
  • 1)Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-Solving: A Pilot Study. 2)From Hallucinogens Nichols DE Pharmacology & Therapeutics 101 (2004) ******** Spitzer et al. (1996) conducted a double-blind, placebocontrolled study of the effects of psilocybin on semantic and indirect semantic priming. Indirect semantic priming is considered to be an index of spread of activation in semantic networks and this study was designed to measure the spread of activation in semantic networks involved in lexical decision tasks. Although psilocybin had no effect on direct semantic priming, it did increase indirect semantic priming. Their data suggest that psilocybin leads to increased availability of remote associations, thereby bringing cognitive contents to mind that would normally remain inactivated. ********
  • The problem with psychotropics today is that they're crude and non-specific. If and when they have a good brain model down, there might not be a tradeoff between medication and potential.
  • if you are boring and have nothing original to say, then you take drugs, you will a boring person with nothing to say on drugs. The idea that you can buy crativity or genius or "expand your mind" for the price of a hit of acid was silly in the 60s and is doubly so now. Yes, the Beatles wrote some great songs (allegedly) about acid experiences. Note: they were the Beatles. Most people are not. The whole "prozac kills artists" thing is a flaming cliche at this point. I would like to see some hard evidence to back it up. What about the depressive's long periods of total inactivity, staring at the wall or curled in the fetal position, weeping? If he was on the pills, maybe he would do something useful during those times?
  • drjimmy11: I agree... to a point. "The idea that you can buy crativity or genius or "expand your mind" for the price of a hit of acid was silly in the 60s and is doubly so now." I beg to differ. If you haven't had strange and bizarre thoughts, some of them quite original (at least to you) while on psychadelics, you haven't had good stuff/dose or a good mindset going into it. I know for a fact that my experiences have opened up alternate perspectives for me on various topics, not to mention a bit a self discovery. Maybe perspectives or discovery of the mundane to some people, but nonetheless I think I've benefitted. I'm definitely with you on the Prozac flame cliche though.
  • The only person who appears to enjoy my life on drugs is me. Imagine if I started taking uppers...
  • Completely undecidable. 1) Are artists/thinkers more likely to be depressive and take mood-altering drugs because of that? Tortured artists are fun and all, but they're also a suspicious cliché. 2) Are artists less likely to do mind-altering substances? Uppers are pretty fun, but they destroy people fast. Hallicunogenics are pretty harmless, but I'm doubtful they have any kind of creativity enhancing effect. They're like having any experience, travelling or going to war. They might change you, and you might write great things because of that. Or not. Lots of people flew planes. One of them wrote The Little Prince.
  • I know what kills creativity - having to work!
  • We need another absinthe age
  • They're like having any experience, travelling or going to war. They might change you, and you might write great things because of that. Or not. True. Difference is that psychedelics present a new category of experience, as opposed to just a new experience. As the cliche goes, set/setting make a big difference. This is true for all experiences, it's just explicitly apparent with psychedelics.
  • Famous writers who drank to excess: Edgar Allen Poe Ernest Hemingway William Faulkner Fyodor Doestoyevsky Bertolt Brecht Hunter S. Thompson John Irving ...etc. You don't need to "expand your mind" to write, you need to numb large parts of it to concentrate on the tedium of putting words to paper in a particular order.