Updating the dynamic framework of thought: Creativity and psychedelics

The theory-building paper (2020) argues that the psychedelic state may facilitate creative generation and discusses the neurocognitive states in which creative thought takes place.

Abstract

“Contemporary investigations regard creativity as a dynamic form of cognition that involves movement between the dissociable stages of creative generation and creative evaluation. Our recently proposed Dynamic Framework of Thought (Christoff et al., 2016) offered a conceptualization of these stages in terms of an interplay between sources of constraint and variability on thought. This initial conceptualization, however, has yet to be fully explicated and given targeted discussion. Here, we refine this framework’s account of creativity by highlighting the dynamic nature of creative thought, both within and between the stages of creative generation and evaluation. In particular, we emphasize that creative generation in particular is best regarded as a product of multiple, varying mental states, rather than being a singular mental state in and of itself. We also propose that the psychedelic state is a mental state with high potential for facilitating creative generation and update the Dynamic Framework of Thought to incorporate this state. This paper seeks to highlight the dynamic nature of the neurocognitive processes underlying creative thinking and to draw attention to the potential utility of psychedelic substances as experimental tools in the neuroscience of creativity.”

Authors: Manesh Girn, Caitlin Mills, Leor Roseman, Robin L. Carhart-Harris, Kalina Christoff

Notes

Creativity calls for divergent and convergent thinking, here put as generation and evaluation.

“… the process of arriving at a creative product requires shifting between the neurocognitively dissociable modes of creative generation and evaluation.”

On simulated annealing as the process by which creativity happens.

“That is, assuming multiple cycles of idea generation and evaluation in the creative process, it may be the case that initial iterations of generation have relatively low/broad constraints, which are progressively increased/focused in successive iterations.”

The authors also link back to the infamous REBUS paper (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019).

“Thus, psychedelics might facilitate the exploration of a broader search space during creative generation, which in turn leads to greater potential of discovering highly novel ideas”

Summary

ABSTRACT

Contemporary investigations of creativity regard it as a dynamic form of cognition that involves movement between the dissociable stages of creative generation and creative evaluation. We propose that the psychedelic state is a mental state with high potential for facilitating creative generation.

1. Introduction

Creative thinking is a ubiquitous form of cognition that involves moving between different modes of thought. It is a dynamic process that involves shifting between the neurocognitively dissociable modes of creative generation and evaluation. The dynamic framework of thought (DFT) incorporates conceptualizations of creative generation and evaluation into a model that focuses on the competing forces of constraint and variability on thought. However, the DFT’s conception of creative thinking has yet to receive targeted discussion.

To overcome the elusiveness of inspiration, artists have been known to employ a variety of techniques, including invoking the muses, sensory deprivation, and mind-altering drugs. These substances may represent a novel means of experimentally investigating particular dimensions of creative generation.

The present paper attempts to refine the conception of creative thought proposed by Christoff et al. (2016) and incorporate the psychedelic state into the conception of creative thought.

2. Reconceptualizing creativity in the dynamic framework of thought

The dynamic framework of thought (DFT) model situates creative thought within a continuous conceptual space alongside other types of thought, and proposes two primary types of constraints: deliberate constraints and automatic constraints. These constraints operate on mnemonic information provided by medial temporal lobe regions of the default network.

The DFT situates creative thinking in a location corresponding to moderate deliberate constraints and weak-moderate automatic constraints, but the process of creative generation and evaluation is best described as a dynamic movement between multiple mental states.

Rather than being a singular state, creative generation takes place as a result of being in multiple locations in the conceptual landscape of the framework. This variability requirement contrasts with other phenomena (e.g., dreaming or goal-directed thought), which have comparatively more defined positions.

The DFT predicts that the generation period for divergent thinking tasks will involve high DNMTL, low FPCN, and low-moderate SN involvement, while the evaluation phase will notably involve high FPCN involvement/FPCN-DN coupling.

A study examined creative generation vs. evaluation in the context of drawing artwork. The DFT predicted increased activation in the DNMTL, DN, FPCN, and SN during generation, and decreased activation in evaluation.

In a recent study, pianists were asked to improvise based on an internally-based constraint or an externally-based constraint. The DFT predicted that the DLPFC would be involved in both creative generation conditions, and this prediction was confirmed.

We focus on dynamics in the creative process and present a conceptualization of the creative process based on the concept of ‘simulated annealing’.

2.1. Viewing the dynamics of the creative process as simulated annealing

The DFT and previous investigations of creativity typically view creativity as a cyclical alternation between creative generation and evaluation, but reports by artists indicate that the process is more complex than a simple oscillation. We introduce the analogy of simulated annealing to explain this process.

Simulated annealing allows greater exploration of the search space, and a consequent lower likelihood of settling for a local optimum rather than eventually finding the global optimum. Applied to creativity, this may lead to a process of progressive increase in the specificity/ amount of constraints applied during generation.

In many fields where creativity is necessary, iterative focusing is a common theme. In rapid prototyping, this process may first occur in the designer’s mind, followed by more focused tests of the product.

The precise phenomenology of creative generation varies across task domains, but a neurophenomenological approach is required to investigate the neurocognitive dynamics underlying creative thought.

3. Incorporating the psychedelic state in the dynamic framework

The psychedelic state is similar to dreaming in that it features vivid imagery, hyper-associative thinking, reduced reality testing, as well as changes in affect lability, meaning attribution, and sense of self. However, important differences also exist, such as the presence of meta-cognitive awareness.

Psychedelics may represent a novel opportunity to evaluate the neural predictions of our framework and to investigate the neuroscience of creative generation.

3.1. Support for incorporating psychedelics into the DFT: A review of psychedelic alterations of creativity

We review the existing research on the relationship between psychedelics and creativity and discuss the potential application of these compounds to creativity research.

Since their introduction into Western society in the mid-20th century, psychedelic substances have been claimed to enhance creativity. However, there is a relative dearth of rigorous scientific investigations into the relationship between psychedelics and creativity.

Research suggests that psychedelics enhance creativity by modulating particular sub-domains of creative thought. Primary process thinking is characterized by hyper-associative thinking, unconstrained thinking, contradictory or illogical thoughts and feelings, the transformation and merging of images, and illogical and abrupt transitions between thoughts. It is often associated with magical/wishful fantasy-based thinking. Early studies found that subjects using primary process dictionaries used more primary process language during the acute psychedelic experience.

A recent study found that individuals who took LSD had a significant increase in primary process thinking, a type of thinking that involves making connections between relatively unrelated words and images.

Studies investigating semantic priming while under the influence of psychedelics have found that subjects selectively commit more substitution errors for semantically-related words, and that subjects perform better on the picture concept task when under the influence of ayahuasca.

The presence of diverse thoughts and distant associations does not imply a greater amount of useful creative outputs. This could be because the acute psychedelic experience involves a non-specific increase in affective salience and meaning that is projected onto internal and external stimuli.

Psychedelics may alter the evaluation of one’s creative ideas and also increase the potential for discovering highly novel ideas, by facilitating the exploration of a broader search space during creative generation.

In the psychedelic state, the ability to draw connections between concepts and the ability to attribute meaning to ideas based on these connections appear to be necessary components of creative generation.

The psychedelic state is thought to facilitate creative generation by decreasing the precision-weighting of high-level priors, which are encoded by high-level aspects of brain function. This in turn liberates low-level inputs from top-down constraints, and increases the potential for new insights and perspectives. This model is supported by a number of empirical findings and suggests that the hierarchical level of imposed constraints on thought might be a neurocognitive phenomenon.

A recent study used EEG to measure brain electrical activity in both audience members and performers during a classical music performance. The performers’ brains showed increased entropy during the ‘let-go’ condition relative to the ‘strict’ condition. Psychedelics increase fMRI timeseries entropy, which has been specifically highlighted as an important component of psychedelic brain action. This provides evidence that the psychedelic state may bear similarities to the mental state of creative improvisation.

4. Conclusions and future directions

In this paper we propose a new framework for understanding creativity, which incorporates the psychedelic state. We also present preliminary neuroimaging results on dimensions of creative thought in the LSD state.

Creative thought involves the dynamic movement between multiple mental states, and can be divided into idea generation and idea evaluation stages. These stages can be further divided into low automatic and high deliberate constraints and moderate automatic constraints and moderate-high deliberate constraints.

We argued that the psychedelic state is a strong candidate for facilitating the generation of creative ideas because it features increased associative thinking and changes in affect/meaning attribution. Past empirical findings provide evidence of psychedelically-induced alterations to creativity-related aspects of cognition and subjective experience. Future work should build on these findings and employ behavioural paradigms that directly assess creativity in subjects following psychedelic administration, in tandem with self-report measures.

Research using psychedelics is currently difficult due to legality, ethics approval, and funding hurdles. However, with a rapidly increasing body of work suggesting their value in both basic science research and a variety of clinical applications, the barriers to conducting research with these compounds are likely to relax.