Biological Psychology
Vol 39 (No. 12) June 15 1996; 1055-1057
by M. Spitzer; M. Thimm; L. Hermie; P. Holzmann; K.A. Kovar; H. Heimann; E. Gouzoulis-Mayfrank; U. Kischka; F. Schneider

COMMENTS :

The June 1996 issue of "Biological Psychiatry" had an article entitled "Increased Activation of Indirect Semantic Associations under Psilcybin" by Manfred Spitzer et al (1996, 39:1055-1057). It is pretty interesting. They gave people 0.2 mg/kg oral psilocybin in a placebo-controlled double- blind study and looked at its effects in a lexical decision making task. Basically, this task involves recognizing whether a string of characters is a word or not. It has been found that if someone has read a related word ("black") just prior to the task, they'll recognize the word ("white") faster. This "priming" effect generally only works for closely related words. However, it has been found that schizophrenic patients can be primed with indirectly related words ("sweet" and "lemon").

In this experiment, the researchers found that psilocybin increased this indirect semantic priming ("sweet"-"lemon") while slowing reaction times. In the discussion, they write:

"From anecdotal records and very few controlled studies these [hallucinogenic] agents are believed to have subjective effects that sometimes are referred to as "broadening consciousness" and "enhancing creativity" (references in Pletscher and Ladewig 1994). Although most objective measures have failed to support these claims, our data suggest that the agent in fact leads to an increased availability of remote associations and thereby may bring cognitive contents to mind that under normal circumstances remain non-activated; however, the generally decreased psychological performances under hallucinogenic agents suggests that the increased indirect priming effect is due to a decreased capacity to use contextual information for the focusing of semantic processing. Hence, subjectively experienced increases in creativity as well as the broadening of consciousness have been found to parallel decreases in objective performance measures."