When it comes to creativity, a lot of people associate it with smoking weed. Whether musicians use it to create lyrics or soothing melodies, or an artist trying to express his or her mind via a piece of canvas, we have heard time and time again that a lot of people smoke weed to get creative. However, is it really necessary to smoke weed to stimulate creativity, how does it help? How much should an individual take? Does it really work? In this article, we are going to answer those questions for you.
To start off, how does cannabis stimulate creativity? Before we continue, we need to know which part of the brain helps creativity. This would be the frontal lobe of the brain and it uses cerebral blood flow to make it active. That being said, once an individual takes weed, it creates more cerebral blood flow towards that part of the brain; therefore, it causes the frontal lobe to be more active.
Though it shows that weed helps with creativity, it does not mean that it’s a pass for smoking as much weed as possible. When it comes to smoking weed to boost creativity, dosage is extremely essential. According to a study covered by Leafly, low doses of THC improves divergent thinking. This includes fluency, flexibility, and many more (Leafly, 2019). On the other hand, high doses will affect performance or the human mind in multiple negative ways. Furthermore, it is recommended that only 5 milligrams of THC should be enough for stimulating creativity.
As stated above, weed does help with creativity in some certain aspects. However, there are some researchers who believe it to be a placebo more than it actually helps the individual. On 2014, there was an experiment lead by Mikael A. Kowal, head of the psychology unit in Leiden University, which had people take cannabis and do activities that involved divergent thinking against those who did not have cannabis but instead used it as a placebo. It resulted in “Participants in the high-dose group displayed significantly worse performance on the divergent thinking task, compared to individuals in both the low-dose and placebo groups (Kowal et. al, 2015).
Do you think that smoking weed helps with creativity? Let us know in the comments section below.
Sources:
https://www.leafly.com/news/science-tech/cannabis-and-creativity-science
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