Psilocybin, creativity and openness: what studies have found

“Psychedelics make you creative” is one of the most repeated claims about psilocybin. It is also one of the easiest to repeat without checking. So what have researchers actually measured, and how much weight can the results carry?

This article walks through the main studies one at a time: what the researchers did, how many people took part, what they found and what limits the authors or we can see. It is a guide to the research, not a complete review of it, and it does not suggest that anyone should take anything.

We use three labels. Established: shown repeatedly in peer-reviewed work and not seriously disputed. Preliminary: early, small or indirect. Unresolved: the data are missing or point different ways. As you will see, almost everything about psilocybin and creativity sits in the second or third group.

Does psilocybin make people more creative?

Not in any way the evidence can support yet. The best-controlled study of psilocybin on creativity tasks, a 2021 trial of 60 adults, found a mixed picture: people felt more insightful during the experience but did worse on structured creativity tasks, and one measure of novel ideas was higher a week later (Mason et al., 2021). Evidence: preliminary.

A 2011 study found that a personality trait called openness was higher in volunteers weeks and months after a high-dose session (MacLean et al., 2011). Openness is not the same as creativity, and that study had no separate control group for its main personality result. Evidence: preliminary.

Studies of microdosing, the repeated use of very small amounts, were designed to test the widely told success stories. In two placebo-controlled studies, the benefits people reported were matched by placebo capsules, or tracked what people believed they had taken (Szigeti et al., 2021; Cavanna et al., 2022). Evidence: preliminary, and consistent with expectation doing much of the work.

The rest of this guide explains why each of those sentences is hedged.

What did the 2011 openness study find?

MacLean, Johnson and Griffiths at Johns Hopkins looked at whether a psilocybin session changed personality. Personality traits are usually stable in adulthood, so a change after a single event would be notable. They analyzed 52 healthy adults, none of whom had taken a hallucinogen before, pooled from two earlier laboratory studies (MacLean et al., 2011).

How the study worked

• Volunteers answered flyers for a study of states of consciousness brought about by psilocybin. They were generally well educated (54% had postgraduate degrees) and spiritually active (90% regularly took part in religious services, discussion groups, prayer or meditation) (MacLean et al., 2011).
• Each person completed two to five long, supervised sessions after extensive preparation. In one study the comparison drug was methylphenidate. In the other there was a placebo session. Participants knew one session would contain a moderate or high dose of psilocybin but not which.
• Personality was measured with a 240-item questionnaire, the NEO Personality Inventory, at screening, one to two months after each drug session and about 14 months after the last session (MacLean et al., 2011).
• The question was whether scores changed after the high-dose session.

What it found

Openness, a trait that includes imagination, aesthetic interest and curiosity about ideas, rose by 2.8 points on a standardized scale after the high-dose session (p = .023). The other four personality domains did not change significantly. The rise was concentrated in people who had a complete mystical-type experience during the session: 30 of the 52. Their openness rose 5.7 points and was still 4.2 points above baseline at follow-up, with the follow-up result sitting right at the usual threshold (p = .050). The other 22 people, who did not have a complete mystical experience, showed no significant change (21 of them completed the follow-up) (MacLean et al., 2011).

As a comparison, the authors reported no significant change in openness after the first session in 30 people whose first session was not a high dose of psilocybin (MacLean et al., 2011). The abstract connects the result to participants’ own claims of increased aesthetic appreciation, imagination and creativity. That is a report of what participants said, and openness was measured by a questionnaire, not a creativity task.

Limits of the 2011 study

• Small and unusual sample. The authors note that nearly all participants were regular spiritual practitioners and suggest such people may be particularly sensitive to mystical-type effects. They call for replication in larger, more diverse groups.
• No separate control group for the headline result. It compares each person’s scores before and after the high-dose session.
• Self-report. Openness comes from a questionnaire that people completed knowing they were in a psilocybin study.
• Openness is not creativity. It is a broad trait. The study did not test whether anyone produced more or better creative work.
• A borderline long-term result. The 14-month result for the mystical-experience group was p = .050 in a subgroup of 30 (MacLean et al., 2011).

Evidence: preliminary. It is an interesting signal about a personality trait, from one team and a small, self-selected group.

What did the 2021 placebo-controlled creativity study find?

Mason and colleagues at Maastricht University ran the most direct test: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of psilocybin on creativity tasks. Sixty healthy adults who had used a psychedelic before (but not in the past three months) were split evenly into a psilocybin group and a placebo group (Mason et al., 2021).

How the study worked

Each person visited the lab three times: a baseline visit, a testing day with psilocybin or placebo, and a follow-up seven days later. The tasks were different versions of the same tests each time. One, the Picture Concept Task, measures convergent thinking (finding the one correct link between pictures) and divergent thinking (listing as many alternative links as possible). Another, the Alternative Uses Task, asks people to list uses for everyday objects. Two raters who did not know the group scored the answers (Mason et al., 2021).

The researchers also measured “insightfulness” with three questions from a questionnaire completed about six hours after dosing (such as having insights into connections that had puzzled the person before), and scanned brain activity at rest (Mason et al., 2021).

What it found

• During the experience, self-rated insightfulness was much higher with psilocybin than placebo (a large difference, effect size d = 1.78) (Mason et al., 2021).
• At the same time, task performance fell. People under psilocybin got fewer correct convergent answers and generated fewer alternative ideas on both tasks (fluency); originality on one task was also lower.
• Seven days later, convergent performance was still lower than the placebo group’s. The number of ideas people judged to be completely new to them on the Alternative Uses Task was higher (a moderate effect, d = 0.52, reported at p = 0.05) (Mason et al., 2021).
• The other measures at follow-up, including the total number of ideas and originality ratings, did not differ significantly between groups.
• Brain-imaging patterns during the experience were associated with some of these outcomes, but the authors say those links should be taken as preliminary.

The authors’ summary was that psilocybin changed creative thinking in a way that depended on time and on the type of task. They describe the findings as adding some support to historical claims that psychedelics can influence aspects of the creative process (Mason et al., 2021). They did not report that creativity improved overall.

Limits of the 2021 study

• Small groups. Thirty people per group, and the brain-imaging comparisons used fewer (22 and 26 after quality control). The task analyses had fewer still in some cases (for example 25 and 26 on one test) (Mason et al., 2021).
• One result carries the headline. The only task measure that was higher at follow-up, novel ideas, was reported at p = 0.05 among many outcomes (Mason et al., 2021). We found a correction for multiple comparisons described for the imaging analyses but not for the task comparisons.
• Self-judged novelty. “Novel” meant that participants said afterwards the use was completely new to them.
• Self-rated insight. The insightfulness result is a retrospective questionnaire, not a measured creative product, and a strongly altering drug is hard to hide from the person taking it. We found no analysis in the paper of whether participants guessed which group they were in.
• Narrow population. Healthy adults with prior psychedelic experience, followed for seven days.
• Task performance is not creative work. The tasks are short laboratory tests, not a poem, a design or a research idea.

Evidence: preliminary. This is a careful, randomized study, and its fair reading is that the picture is mixed, with performance on structured tasks lower while the experience lasts.

What do placebo-controlled microdosing studies show?

Microdosing is the repeated use of very low, sub-perceptual amounts. Stories about creativity and focus are common. Surveys and open-label studies exist, but the authors of the controlled studies below note they are vulnerable to confirmation bias and placebo effects, because the people who take part are self-selected and optimistic. Two studies tried to remove that bias with placebo capsules.

The self-blinding citizen-science study (2021)

Szigeti and colleagues at Imperial College London built an online method in which people prepared their own placebo-controlled routine at home: capsules with a microdose or a placebo went into envelopes so they did not know which they were taking. Of 1,630 people who signed up, 240 started and 191 completed the main study, which the authors described as the largest placebo-controlled psychedelic study to date (Szigeti et al., 2021).

• Participants used their own material. 61% used LSD, 14% an LSD analogue and 24% mushrooms containing psilocybin, so this is not a psilocybin-only study. The authors could not verify what the material was or how much it contained.
• Participants were mostly educated, middle-aged men (70% male, average age 33.5) and most were in favour of psychedelics: 74% agreed or strongly agreed that they were active advocates of psychedelic drug use.
• The microdosing group improved on every psychological measure from baseline to the end of the four-week period. The placebo group also improved, on several of the same measures, and no significant differences between groups were found. Cognitive tests showed no benefit either.
• Openness was one of the measures: it rose in the microdose group (0.9 points, p = 0.03) but the authors report no significant difference between groups on any scale at any timepoint.
• Small differences did show up in acute ratings from daily self-rated scales, including creativity, but the authors say these can be explained by participants working out which capsule they had taken.

The authors concluded that the anecdotal benefits of microdosing can be explained by the placebo effect (Szigeti et al., 2021). They also give limits: the design was part-controlled and part-observational, people could not be checked on whether they followed the procedure, the sample was healthy, and the study should not be read as clinical evidence. Evidence: preliminary.

The 2022 double-blind mushroom study

Cavanna and colleagues in Argentina recruited 34 adults who were planning to start microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms, using word of mouth, social media and workshops. In a randomized, double-blind, within-subjects design, each person had one week with real dried Psilocybe cubensis in capsules and one week with a placebo made from an edible mushroom, in an order set by a third party. Measures included creativity tests (a convergent task and two divergent tasks), perception, cognition and EEG (Cavanna et al., 2022).

• Acute effects were reported as stronger for the active dose, but only in participants who correctly identified which week it was. Participants identified the condition correctly in 49 of 64 measurement weeks (75%) (Cavanna et al., 2022).
• On the creativity tasks, no differences were significant except two scores (one on fluency, one on elaboration) that did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. The Bayesian statistics mostly favoured no difference.
• The only other changes were small and pointed toward worse cognitive performance, along with reduced theta-band EEG power.

The authors reported no evidence for enhanced well-being, creativity or cognitive function and concluded that “expectation underlies at least some of the anecdotal benefits” of microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms (Cavanna et al., 2022). Their limits include a small sample (especially in the “blinded” subset, where they say the evidence was too thin to settle either way) and uncertainty about how much active ingredient the mushroom material contained. Evidence: preliminary.

What recent reviews say

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of microdosing in healthy adults covered 24 studies and 3,681 participants. Its authors found that randomized trials of psilocybin and LSD microdosing showed subjective and brain-activity effects but minimal impact on cognition, creativity or sustained mood. They found that observational studies reported mood and personality improvements, likely influenced by expectancy or lifestyle factors, and called the randomized evidence inconclusive (Meshkat et al., 2026). Only six studies fed the meta-analyses, whose pooled estimates were for depressive symptoms, anxiety and stress rather than creativity. A separate 2026 systematic review of microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms and truffles judged the certainty of the evidence to be low and said a causal effect cannot be inferred (Page et al., 2026). We read both by abstract only.

Why do expectations matter so much here?

Two ideas explain most of the disagreement between enthusiastic reports and cautious studies.

1. Expectancy. If you believe a substance helps creativity, you may feel more creative and rate your own ideas more highly. Szigeti’s sample was largely made up of supporters, and Cavanna recruited people who were already planning to microdose.
2. Broken blinds. A placebo-controlled study only works if people cannot tell which they took. In Cavanna’s study, participants guessed correctly in 75% of weeks, and the stronger effects appeared only in those who guessed right (Cavanna et al., 2022). In Szigeti’s study, the authors say the small acute differences can be explained by participants breaking the blind (Szigeti et al., 2021).

This is why the self-rated measures in these studies deserve more suspicion than the task scores. When the studies did use performance tests, the differences largely vanished (Szigeti et al., 2021; Cavanna et al., 2022). Evidence: preliminary. Both sets of authors discuss unblinding as a limit on what their results can show.

The same caution applies in reverse to survey work that finds psychedelic users scoring higher on creativity tests. A 2025 online survey of 326 people (187 psychedelic users and 139 non-users) found users scored higher on originality and fluency on a divergent-thinking task, and the authors describe this as an association (Rominger and Subow, 2025). A survey cannot show whether psychedelic use changed anyone, or whether people who were already more open and imaginative chose to use. We read it by abstract only.

How strong is the evidence? A study-by-study table

What does none of this establish?

• That psilocybin improves creativity. Not in any study covered here. The controlled studies found lower task performance during the experience, no effect of microdosing beyond placebo, and one borderline increase in self-judged novelty a week later.
• That any effect lasts or matters in real life. Follow-ups ran for a week (Mason) to about 14 months (MacLean). None tested creative output such as art, writing, designs or research.
• That openness change is the same thing as creative ability. They are related ideas, but a personality questionnaire is not a creativity test.
• That results from healthy, mostly experienced or spiritually active volunteers apply to anyone else.
• That the drug, rather than expectation, set and setting, produced the effects. Blinding failed often enough that this is a live question, especially for microdosing.
• Anything about risk or safety. These studies were not designed to settle safety questions, and nothing here is advice about use. See our safety page.

What we still don’t know

• Whether the novelty result in Mason et al. (2021) can be repeated in a larger study (unresolved).
• Whether openness changes after psilocybin hold up in larger, more varied samples with a proper control group (unresolved).
• How to measure real-world creativity in a way that is hard to game with expectation (unresolved).
• Whether any microdosing effect exists beyond expectation once blinding is protected, for example with an active placebo (unresolved). Each study we read lists this as a limit or a need.

So the careful version of the story is: psilocybin can change how people feel about their own thinking, short laboratory tasks do not show that it makes thinking more creative, and the best placebo-controlled microdosing data point to expectation. For the wider science, read our guides to what psilocybin is and whether psilocybin rewires the brain.

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