Does Cannabis Make You More Creative? What the Research Says

That 9 p.m. moment is so real: you take a few hits or have an edible and you’re convinced you just unlocked your best work. Then morning comes, and your “master plan” reads like a confused note to yourself. So we’re asking the question most people skip: does cannabis make you more creative, or does it mainly make you feel more creative?

We walk through what the research says about THC dose and creativity, and explore how it can impact your creative practice. Listen in on why the takeaway is simple and usable. 

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Transcript

Welcome And The Big Question

Margaret 1:19

Welcome friends to episode 363. And today we're talking about cannabis and creativity. I'm your host, Margaret, a certified gangier, a TCI certified cannabis educator, and I believe your kitchen is the best dispensary that you'll ever have. Welcome to Bite Me, the show about edibles. And friends, I just want to say if you're joining me for the first time, I'm so glad you found me. I would love to hear how you found the show. I've always find that interesting. And if you've been with us for a while, I appreciate you being here and making this possible. Because if it wasn't for you out there listening, I'd be talking to myself in my basement recording studio, and that would just be depressing. So thank you for being here. Let's get into today's topic: cannabis and creativity. What does the science actually say? So there's a scene I know a lot of you probably intimately understand. It's nine o'clock. You've had a productive little smoke session, or perhaps you've enjoyed an edible, you've got a candle going, maybe some Fleetwood Mac on, and you get hit with an idea. Not just any idea, the idea. The one that's going to be the podcast episode, the painting, the business plan, the screenplay that finally gets you out of your day job. You grab your phone, you start typing furiously, you feel like a genius. You are at that exact moment absolutely certain you have cracked something open that sober you could never have touched. The next morning you open your notes app and it says, Dog treats, but for humans? I've done this a few times, more than I care to admit. And for years I told myself the problem was that I hadn't written it down fast enough, or that maybe the good idea got lost somewhere between my brain and my thumbs. It took me a long time to ask the actual question, which is the one we're asking here today. Does cannabis make you more creative,

The Stoner Genius Myth

Speaker 3:21

or does it just make you feel more creative? Turns out those are two very different questions. And the research on this is a lot more interesting and a lot more useful than any stoner genius myth we've been sold. So, first of all, there's the myth we inherited. The cultural story is old and it is deep. Steve Jobs talked about weed making him relaxed and creative. There might have also been some psychedelics involved in that. Every stoner comedy from the last 50 years has some version of the couch bound a genius who solves the meaning of life between bong rips. We've absorbed this idea that intoxication and inspiration are basically the same door. And look, I'm not here to tell you that that door doesn't exist. Cannabis absolutely changes how your brain processes information, how loosely it associates ideas, how willing it is to follow a weird thought instead of shutting it down. That part is definitely real. But changes how your brain works and makes your work better are not the same claim. And the actual research on artists and cannabis has spent the last couple of decades quietly picking that difference apart. It's akin to the difference between feeling drunk and confident at a karaoke night and actually singing well. Those two things can happen completely independently of each other. And the honest answer is that with cannabis and creativity, they usually do. So here's what the research actually found. We'll get into it because this is where it gets really useful for anyone who makes things. DOS is doing almost all of the work. There's a study out of Leiden University in the Netherlands, led by researcher Mikael Koval, and published in the journal Psychopharmacology in 2015. I think sums it up here. They gave regular cannabis users either a placebo, a low dose of vaporized THC, or a high dose, and then tested them on classic creativity tasks called the alternate uses task. That's the how many uses can you think of for a brick test? It's the standard way researchers measure what's called divergent thinking, which is the brainstorming

THC Dose And Brainstorming Science

Speaker 5:32

side of creativity, the part where you're generating lots of those loose possibilities rather than narrowing in on one right answer. The low-dose group performed no differently from the placebo group, but the high-dose group did significantly worse. Not the same, worse. Getting really stoned didn't unlock some hidden reservoir of ideas. It actually got in the way of generating them. So the first thing the science tells us pretty clearly is that more high does not equal more creative. If anything, the opposite is true. Once you cross a certain threshold, which if you've never tried to have a coherent thought at the top of a strong edible, it probably won't even surprise you a little bit. But this is the part of the research that changed how I think about my own creative process. A study published more recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology, led by researcher Yina Heng, had cannabis users and non-users generate ideas for a business problem, then rated their own ideas and other people's ideas for creativity. Cannabis use didn't improve the actual quality of the ideas generated as judged by outside evaluators. What it did do was make people feel more joyful in the moment, and that jovial feeling made them rate both their own ideas and other people's ideas as significantly more creative than they objectively were. Cannabis didn't make the ideas better. It made you a worse judge of whether they were good. And that tracks with my Dog Treats for Humans note from earlier. In the moment, Jaime thought, you know, that was visionary. Sober me, reading it back, understood it for the confused 11 p.m. thought that it actually was. So is there anything real here or is it all just a mood? Not entirely just a mood. There's a 2017 study in the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition from researchers Emily LaFrance and Carrie Cutler at Washington State University that looked past the are you high right now question and asked a longer-term one, comparing

When Confidence Beats Quality

Speaker 7:31

regular cannabis users to non-users on creativity tests while both groups were sober. They found that cannabis users did tend to score higher on certain creativity measures, even when not intoxicating. But the researchers connected that difference to a personality trait called openness to experience, which cannabis users tended to score higher on across the board. In plain terms, it's possible that people who are already wired to think in loose, associative, boundary-pushing ways are simply more drawn to cannabis in the first place rather than cannabis installing the trait in someone who didn't already have it. The plant doesn't appear to be manufacturing creativity out of nothing. It might be amplifying or attracting people who already lean in that direction. So you take those three findings together and you get a much more honest picture than Smoke Wee Get Inspired. Dose matters enormously with high doses actively working against loose idea generation. Cannabis reliably makes you feel more creative in the moment, whether or not the work backs that up. And any real connection between cannabis use and creative traits looked more tangled up with who's drawn to the plant than with the high itself. So, how do we actually use this? None of this means cannabis has no place in the creative process. It means the stoner genius myth was giving you the wrong instructions. So let's talk about what the right ones might look like. Match the dose to the stage, not the vibe. If you're in the brainstorming stage, a low dose can support that kind of open thinking without tipping you into the impairment zone, the leiden study found at higher doses. So find your low functional dose for idea generation specifically, separate from whatever dose you use for winding down at night or pain relief or any of those other things. And you're working with the plant instead of

Openness To Experience Explained

Speaker 9:31

just getting high near your notebook. It's a lot more intentional. Once you move into the editing, refining, and actually finishing the thinking, that's the convergent thinking territory, narrowing down to one right answer. And that's exactly the kind of task the research suggests cannabis is least likely to help with and may actively work against you at higher doses. So that's more of a sober task, or at a minimum, a much lower dose task for most people. Given what the Heng study found about cannabis inflating how creative you feel your ideas are, build in a delay before you decide something is brilliant. Write it down while you're high, if that's when the ideas are flowing, sure, but save the judgment call for in the morning. Set and setting still count for something here. The frontal lobe is where a lot of the associative idea generating work happens. And there's research going back to the early 90s, including work discussed by neurologist Alice Flatterty at Harvard Medical School, showing cannabis can increase blood flow to that region. But brain activity doesn't happen in a vacuum. Comfortable, low-stress environments support that kind of loose thinking, regardless of what's in your system. A stressful, rushed or overstimulating setting is going to fight against your creative process, whether you're high or not. A stressful, rushed or overstimulating setting is going to fight against your creative process, whether you're high or not. And be honest about whether this is even the tool for you. If you're not someone who already leans towards open associative thinking when you're sober, cannabis is not going to install that trait for you. The Lafrance and

Practical Rules For Creative Work

Speaker 11:06

Cutler research suggests this is closer to a personality fit than a universal hack. Some of you are going to try a low dose brainstorm session and feel like a window opened. And some of you are going to try it and feel present and a little slower. And that's useful information too. It's not a failure. It's just different. This is what taking control of your high life actually looks like in practice. Not just chasing someone else's stoner genius story, but figuring it out with actual intention and tracking and what the plant and your processes do together. So I just want to bring this back to that 9 p.m. idea from the top of the episode. I don't think the lesson here is stop getting creative ideas while you're high because plenty of real good work has come out of exactly that kind of session. The lesson is to stop treating the in the moment feeling of brilliance as proof of anything and start treating your creative practice the same way you'd treat a recipe. You test it, you adjust the dose, you write down what actually worked, and you come back to it sober to see if it holds up. And a creative practice is just that a practice. And there may be places where cannabis is an excellent fit and other parts of it where it may need to take more of a back seat. So if you're in the Bite Me Cannabis Club, I'd love to hear about your creative rituals and how cannabis fits in those rituals. Do you have a dose or ritual that reliably works for you when you're trying to write, paint, or cook up a new idea or plan something big? Drop it in the community, or you can send me a fan mail as well. I read everything people send me, so don't hesitate. I guarantee someone else needs exactly your vision. So that's it for today, my friends. Your kitchen is the best dispensary that you'll ever have. And it turns out it might also be a pretty decent studio, as long as you're honest with yourself about what's actually happening in there. And I know myself, from a creative perspective, I do a lot of the work sober. And I do come up with ideas when I'm high because that's when I'm like blowing down a little bit. That's what it really helps me to do is slow down and be present. That's it for this week, my friends. I am your host, Margaret. And until next time, stay curious, stay creative, and stay high.