New evidence suggests that cocaine enhances creativity, but only in certain instances. Specifically, cocaine was found to enhance divergent thinking, the type of creativity associated with brainstorming, but only on figural tasks and not on verbal tasks. This finding comes from a study published in European Neuropsychopharmacology.

While popular belief suggests that cocaine can be used to enhance creative thinking and defeat mental blocks, these claims have yet to be confirmed by science. Previous findings are mixed and researchers suggest this may have to do with the fact that there is more than one type of creative thinking.

They proposed that divergent thinking, which involves brainstorming multiple solutions to a problem, should be enhanced by cocaine. Convergent thinking, which involves finding the correct solution to a problem, should be impaired by cocaine.

Researchers conducted a study with a sample of 24 healthy recreational drug users where the average age was 22 years. Participants were then separated into two groups. One group was given a capsule containing 300 mg cocaine HCl and the other group was given a placebo pill. The study was double-blind which meant that neither the experimenters nor the subjects knew which pill was given to which group.

Sixty-minutes after taking the pill, participants in both groups provided subjective ratings of creativity and completed a range of tests designed to measure either divergent or convergent thinking, with either figural or verbal tasks. To measure convergent thinking, participants completed two figural tasks called the Tower of London and the Picture Concept Task, as well as a verbal task called the Remote Associates Task. To assess divergent thinking, subjects completed a verbal task called the Alternative Uses Task, and a figural task called the Pattern/Line Meanings Task.

Results showed that while the group given cocaine capsules had higher self-ratings of creativity, their scores on the objective creativity tests did not show the same pattern. When it came to divergent thinking, the type of creativity akin to brainstorming, the cocaine capsules enhanced performance on the two figural tasks but hindered performance on the verbal tasks. Where convergent thinking was concerned, the type of creativity used when finding the correct solution to a problem, cocaine impaired performance on one of the figural tasks but did not affect performance on the other two tasks.

The authors explain that these findings are telling because they “highlight the mismatch between subjective experiences and objective performance also demonstrated by other research with psychoactive substances”.

Researchers discuss the unanticipated finding that cocaine only hindered performance on one of the convergent thinking tasks. They suggest this might be due to differences between the Picture Concept Task, which involves semantic associations, and the Tower Of London, which is a spatial problem-solving task. Researchers were also surprised to see that cocaine strengthened divergent thinking for the task involving figural stimuli and impaired divergent thinking for the task using verbal stimuli. They propose that the answer may have to do with differences in the underlying brain networks for verbal and figural stimuli.

The authors emphasize, “These findings underline the importance of using a large variety of tasks and stimuli in order to get a complete picture of the effects of a substance on a complex concept such as creativity”.

The study, “Cocaine enhances figural, but impairs verbal ‘flexible’ divergent thinking”, was authored by Nadia R.P.W. Hutten, Laura Steenbergen, Lorenza S. Colzato, Bernard Hommel, Eef L. Theunissen, Johannes G. Ramaekers, and Kim P.C. Kuypers.