It’s well-known that magic mushrooms can cause people to wear fluorescent clothing and listen to really awful trance – but can small doses of shrooms make you creative?

Yep, according to new research from (where else?) Holland.

The researchers dosed volunteers with small doses (0.37 of a gram) of dried truffles – then assessed their ‘out of the box’ thinking (note: this is not the same as ‘out of your box’).

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In recent years, Silicon Valley types have started to bang on about the benefits of ‘microdosing’ LSD – so the researchers basically thought, ‘What about ‘shrooms?’


Luisa Prochazkova of Leiden University in the Netherlands said, ‘Taken together, our results suggest that consuming a microdose of truffles allowed participants to create more out-of-the-box alternative solutions for a problem, thus providing preliminary support for the assumption that microdosing improves divergent thinking.

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‘Moreover, we also observed an improvement in convergent thinking, that is, increased performance on a task that requires the convergence on one single correct or best solution.’



‘Apart from its benefits as a potential cognitive enhancement technique, microdosing could be further investigated for its therapeutic efficacy to help individuals who suffer from rigid thought patterns or behavior such as individuals with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.’

Can magic mushrooms cure people of fascism? (Picture: Shutterstock) It sounds like a crazy idea, but taking magic mushrooms seems to alter people’s political views, according to a new study by the Psychedelic Research Group at Imperial College The researchers gave two oral doses of psilocybin (the ‘magic’ in magic mushrooms), to patients suffering from treatment-resistant depressions, PsyPost reports. They were also surveyed about their political views and how they felt about nature. The researchers found that people who had taken the drug had a drop in authoritarian attitudes and felt more related to nature. One patient said, ‘Before I enjoyed nature, now I feel part of it. Before I was looking at it as a thing, like TV or a painting… But now I see there’s no separation or distinction… you are it.’ The researchers write, ‘Our findings tentatively raise the possibility that given in this way, psilocybin may produce sustained changes in outlook and political perspective, here in the direction of increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarianism.’ The researchers say that further research is required to work out why this effect happens. The researchers write, ‘It would be hasty, therefore, to attempt any strong claims about a causal influence due specifically to psilocybin at this stage.’