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Comment by vlehto | Hacker News Reader

Some of my friends report how eating certain mushrooms made the super creative. I have asked what they created? Nothing. The reason why they think they we're creative is because they felt creative.

This article made similar thing for me with respect to learning. I feel like I learned something. But I really don't remember what.

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I actually buy that psychedelics make people more creative. People fall into more predictable mental ruts than random exploration would, so anything that kicks the brain out of the patterns it wants to match to is going to help.

Agree. "Creative," may be a misleading term if interpreted literally and nothing tangible has been created, but colloquially, I think we use the term more to refer to patterns of thought and behavior that derail the self or others from their normal patterns.

Agree. Maybe it comes down to the relationship between "creative" and "productive". They're related without being synonymous. I think "chemically" is just one way of accomplishing the goal of thinking differently but as it's a pretty reliable method (albeit an occasionally overpowered one) it comes up a lot.

I'll leave the discussions of whether the various drawbacks outweigh the benefits for another conversation but it's hard to deny that treating yourself chemically can be a very direct and effective way to ensure your thought patterns and processes are temporarily changed.

I've heard house mates talking when high on cannabis - while I was not high. They had incredible ideas and were really enthusiastic. The only problem was that it was impossible to make any sense of the ideas they expressed.

Cannabis often makes me more creative in terms of ideas, but not usually execution.

I'd be happy with ideas. But those dudes didn't even remember what ideas they had. Then maybe it was just a feeling.

For some reason I can't edit that comment. But I'd like to add that I still upvoted that article. Not because of that article itself, but because of comments here. A decent conversation starter.

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