Study: Microdosing mushrooms boosts problem-solving and creativity

Microdosing, the concept of taking a small amount of a psychedelic, has been growing in popularity and garnering a great deal of interest in the scientific community.

In Silicon Valley, LSD microdosing is the latest trend in productivity, and the habit is said to help sharpen thinking skills and boost creativity at work.

More and more researchers are studying the impacts of microdosing, especially because of the reported effects that psychedelics have on depression and anxiety.

Researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands recently conducted a study, the first of its kind, to better understand how microdosing mushrooms helps with problem-solving skills.

The results showed that taking a small amount of magic mushrooms helped study participants come up with more original ideas and tackle solutions more effectively.

36 participants took part in the study, and the researchers gave them a microdose, 0.37 grams, of dried truffles.

The participants were asked to complete three tasks designed to assess problem-solving and fluid intelligence before and after taking the truffles.

Specifically, the researchers measured the participants’ convergent and divergent thinking skills which involves finding either one or several solutions to a problem, according to the Daily Mail.

The participants were better at coming up with many different solutions and were more creative in their solutions after taking the microdose.

“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,” Luisa Prochazkova, the leader of the study, told the Daily Mail.

The results are limited due to the small number of participants, but the study is yet another in a growing field investigating the impacts of microdosing psychedelics and the benefits for cognition, focus, creativity, and as a treatment for some forms of mental health disorders.

“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,” said Prochazkova.

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By Kay Vandette, Earth.com Staff Writer