Drugs & the creative process

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Speaker 0 (0s): Okay. So being Friday, what, what are people a lot of people do on Fridays, they celebrate get ready for the weekend. Maybe they have a few beers. Maybe you start your day out with a cup of coffee in the spirit of caffeine and in the spirit of booze and in the spirit of changing your consciousness. I thought today we would talk a little bit. What about drugs? 

Right? We all do them. We all do them. Pick your poison. They say, what's your favorite poison? It's a good question. It's a good question. But I don't want to talk about just any kind of drug today. I thought we'd talk about a new type of drug that's been on the market for a while. And that type of drug, I guess, would be classified as no tropics in Oh, O tropics. 

No. Oh, tropics. And what this family of drugs claims to do is to make you smarter. Think about that kind of abstractive first you think of what there's a drug that makes me smarter. I know how that works. Well, let's start with some of the drugs we know that people use that may make them a little bit smarter. 

Yeah. And try and think about the mechanism of action that would make them smarter. First off you want to think about writers like Stephen King and Christopher Hitchens and all these, all these writers. At least when I was growing up, they were pretty big smokers. And what is the, what is the drug? And in of choice of smokers, usually nicotine, right. 

And nicotine is almost like a neurotransmitter. And if you listen to some, I think there was a, I think that there was a interview with Stephen King Ray talked about how much he smoked and how, when he was writing and he would smoke a lot. And if you've never been the smoker or you never had a seat, you're right. You're probably like, dude, that's just, that's just disgusting. And you're right. 

Cigarette smoking is pretty gross. However, it, it definitely does something to you. You know, at first it can give you like a bus. Like when you first start smoking cigarettes, you you'd get like a nicotine buzz. But then after a while it's more of like a common sensation. So it's definitely flooding part of your brain. The nicotine goes in action, like some sort of a neurotransmitter and stuff, simulates parts of the brain, which seems to lead to a more creative process. 

So you could say that nicotine while ultimately bad for your health. Well, I don't know if nicotine's bad for, you know, smoke is definitely bad for your health active ingredient that leads to creativity and cigarettes is nicotine. And while smoking is bad, nicotine may be an agent of creativity. So there's one caffeine, right? Again, people that tend to, well, how many people wake up and have a cup of coffee in the morning? 

I don't know if that makes you more creative, but it might make you more productive. And I think you could argue that that is a level of intelligence that that's kind of an abstract argument. However, you could say that being productive leads you to a better life, which would be a smarter way of, I know that's kind of reaching. So those are a couple of mainstream drugs people use to maybe make their life a little bit better. 

Not sure smarter. I'm not sure it's smarter. I would say the nicotine may lead to creativity. And then you start getting into today's writers. Like if you look at today's journalists, there's probably a pretty good chance. They're like on Adderall. Adderall is like legal meth. You take Mike, if you take Adderall, I think the, one of the best ways to describe it would be like kind of a clear headed, extremely focused high intensity coffee buzz. 

But it's almost not fair to describe it that way because the level of focus and the level of energy is, is makes coffee look like having a bite of chocolate. Does that make sense? I hope so. On top of that, Adderall lasts, I don't know, eight hours. You gotta remind yourself. 

You could say that a lot, the different drugs, they put you into a different state of consciousness, thus, allowing you to see things different than you normally do, right? Nat is what in fact creates the creative process big. Now what seems to do big now is kind of psychedelics. And if you look at say mushrooms, it's magic mushrooms, or siliciden for example, there's a lot of work being done at a John Hopkins right now that they thought a lot of success treating people with PTSD. 

They have had a lot of success helping people, helping stroke victims. And on top of that, what's awesome about that. Research is a lot of it is public. It can, you can see, you can read the reports and you can look at the brain mapping technology. They've used to see kind of what's happening in the brain. And according to some research that I read, it's a lot of, it's a lot big words. 

And it's a lot of so stuff that you really have to kind of like you start reading something, right? I didn't even know what that word is. They gotta stop. Look it up and you gotta go back to reading it. And then you find another one you got dang, man, I'm not a doctor. Anyways. I'll try to spare you the technical jargon and break it down into digestible chunks that everybody can understand. So in your brain, you have this thing called the default default mode network. 

Think of it like a, like a black box at the base of your back of your head. Like that's all like the circuitry goes through there and then kind of gets dispersed. And then it goes to these different channels, these big grooves that have been cut since birth, like you've been creating these channels, which is a good way to think about that. Is have you ever gone skiing or do you gone like to the top of the mountain? And there's like, Hey, here's the here is the devil's run. And here is the Pike's peak run. 

And here is the double diamond Harvey Limon run. And here is the tomato run. There's all these grooves, what'd you to the top of the mountain. There's this sign. And there's all of these cut grooves where people have already been going down the trail. That's that's like the white matter in your brain, right there already been these links, these, these pathways carved into the white matter. And those pathways are carved by continually thinking and remembering and restructuring your memories. 

So you have these established patterns. Now imagine if you, you go to the ski slopes and you're the very first one at the top of the mountain. Now there's just fresh powder up there, right? There's no, even though the signs are there, there's fresh powder and it was a big storm. And now there's no grooves cut, right? There's no, there's, it's a clean slate. Okay. So most of us listening to this are, you know, way above 20, 30, 40, and we already have the grooves cut. 

So the default mode network is like the chairlift. And then it takes the, the, you get on the information, gets onto the chair, nothing. It goes to the top. So, so the chair lift is the default mode network. And then it disperses you out to all the ski runs. When you take mushrooms, it shuts down that default mode network. 

So you can no longer take that particular chair lift to the top of the mountain. So instead of no, now the chair knows close. So now you've got to find an alternative route to the top of the mountain. You can either walk up the back way or, you know, maybe there's an old chair lift working on the other side of the slope that you didn't know about. So you got, got to go over there and take that one, or maybe there's a helicopter. You know, there's other ways to get to the ...