Drugs actually won't make you more creative, University of Essex study finds

"You don’t hear about the examples where someone took drugs and passed out and therefore their creativity was lower.”

The University of Essex just burst your favourite artist's bubble.

According to their new study, the notion that drugs make you more creative is actually a myth — and yes, that includes alcohol! This isn't just a couple of stuck-up people in lab coats analysing chemicals outside of any real world context. The researchers actually analysed the ideas creatives came up with while under the influence, and they concluded that they were "disjointed or ill-suited as solutions later on" and were far worse in quality compared to sober work from the same people.

Dr. Paul Hanel from the University of Essex's psychology department blamed the representation of drugs in the media for the misconception, stating, “What we hear about in the media is people who successfully enhance their creativity using drugs, but you don’t hear about the examples where someone took drugs and passed out and therefore their creativity was lower.”

Now, if you took the study's word as gospel and discounted the use of drugs entirely, you wouldn't really get the full picture. If you want to see evidence of drugs in action in the musical process, you don't even have to look any further than psychedelic rock. As the name suggests, the usage of drugs like LSD was crucial to the innovation of the genre, and analysing its history detached from those hallucinogenics would be rather silly.

In fact, the study wasn't trying to discount those experiences at all. They were simply noting that overall, drugs had a negative impact on creativity for the wider population due to physical impairment even though some individual artists did get ideas from the experience. They noted that visions artists had under hallucinogenics could inspire a piece of work, but overall, they argued that it wasn't worth the risk.

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