Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?

Brian Palmer

Slate

October 6, 2011 ET

Apple founder and tech vi­sion­ary Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. Jobs was heav­ily influ­enced by 1960s counter­cul­ture, and once told a reporter that taking LSD was “one of the two or three most important things” he did in his life. Can LSD re­ally make you more cre­ative?
Pos­sibly. Psychology research­ers con­ducted a lot of stud­ies in the 1950s and ‘60s on the relation­ship be­tween psychedel­ic drugs and cre­ativ­ity. Their method­ology was inconsis­tent, though, and the results were somewhat scat­tered. Tak­en as a whole, the stud­ies suggested that people who are cre­ative to be­gin with may expe­ri­ence a slight increase in in­spiration or in­sight dur­ing and af­ter an acid trip. That's not true for non-artis­tic types, al­though                               

psychol­o­gists did find that most partic­ipants thought they got more cre­ative on LSD, regard­less of what the tests actually showed.

Oscar Janiger of UC-Irvine con­ducted the most fa­mous study of how LSD af­fects artis­tic ex­pres­sion. In the late-1950s, he asked around 100 artists, writ­ers, and mu­sicians to make two paint­ings of Hopi kachina dolls, one before and one dur­ing an acid trip. An art histo­rian lat­er exam­ined both sets, and noted that the acid-influ­enced pieces were “more abstract, symbol­ic, brighter, more emotional and aes­thet­ically adven­turesome, and non-rep­resentational, and they tended to use all avail­able space on the canvas.”
Psychiatrist Louis Berlin con­ducted a much small­er study in 1955, admin­is­tering acid to four graph­ic artists. Fel­low artists found the         

work they produced on the drug to be more cre­ative than their sober work. (Berlin had a hard time getting them to work at the peak of         

the trip, though.) Many oth­er research­ers con­ducted stud­ies with similar results.

Most of the tests on or­dinary people—if that’s a