Does Smoking Weed Make You More Creative?

A new study on the effects of smoking marijuana and its relation to
creativity has some interesting results.

The study consisted of 412 marijuana users (they couldn’t find 8 more?) and
309 non-users, and they attempted to answer the question: Does smoking
marijuana make you more creative?

Emily LaFrance, the co-author of the study and graduate student at
Washington State University, says she first became interested in the topic
when she noticed that a lot of her favorite artists admit they smoke
marijuana. “This cannabis use was commonly thought to have been a cause of
the creative success of many artists,” she explains. “I began to wonder about
this commonly held idea – are cannabis users really more creative than non-
users?”

The study is called “Inspired by Mary Jane? Mechanisms underlying enhanced
creativity in cannabis users” and was published in Consciousness and
Cognition. It examined the participants over a variety of areas including
psychological tests, and measuring creative works and achievements.

Some major points from the study include:

Cannabis users were more likely to be extroverted and open to new
experiences.

Cannabis users reported higher levels of artistic creativity, but not a
higher amount of creative achievements or completed works.

Cannabis users performed better on a convergent thinking test (which tests
creative problem solving).

Overall, they did find that those who use marijuana are more creative than
their counterparts who do not use it, but when they dug deeper they made a
startling discovery.

When the scientists included the personality traits into the data, they
realized that these traits on their own could determine whether a person is
more open to using marijuana, as well as drive a tendency to be more
creative.

“Cannabis users may be more creative than non-users,” LaFrance says, “but this
is not because using cannabis has increased their creativity.” She goes on to
explain that it’s the fact that marijuana users “are more open to experience
than non-users, and this openness to experience is associated with both
cannabis use, and heightened creativity.”

So there you have it: if you smoke pot you’re probably more creative than
people who don’t… but it’s not necessarily the weed that’s got your
creativity going. It was you all along!

Note: This study was conducted with all subjects being sober, meaning none
of them were under the influence of marijuana during the test.