The Science Behind Creativity and Cannabis: An Interview With Shawn Gold of Pilgrim Soul

Have you ever wondered if cannabis is actually helpful for the creative process or if it just feels like weed is giving you a creative boost?

We had the pleasure of interviewing cannabis creativity expert Shawn Gold of Pilgrim Soul, a mission-driven company focused on optimizing human creative performance to gain a competitive edge in business and life. Shawn lives his life with the notion that where there is an open mind, there is always a frontier - that everything we've learned is not necessarily an answer but precedence - a jumping-off point for new ideas. Professionally, he uses creative flow for empathetic understanding, hyper-focus, imagination, and idea generation. He developed advertising campaigns for some of America's best-known brands, wrote relationship advice columns for top women's magazines, and helped scale some of Americas' most popular news, entertainment, and social networking websites.

Shawn breaks down what strains of weed are the best for creativity, how you can use weed to get out of your own way and shares some tools for heightening your creativity!

Shawn also created this Pilgrim Soul Cannabis Creative Thinking Guided Journal, filled with over 50 creative thinking exercises that will provide hours of fun, increase your creativity, and build more productive habits.

High Herstory: Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your own creative process? 

Shawn Gold: I’m a father, husband, former tech, and now cannabis entrepreneur who has used cannabis for personal fulfillment and to gain a competitive edge in my work. My 30-year career has been about imagining new businesses and creating new business models.  From Social networking with MySpace to Blogs with Engadget to storytelling with Wattpad to the subscription fashion business with Fabletics and SavageXFenty.

The four stages of the creative process are preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

For me, the preparation phase is about learning and consuming information to become as much of an expert as possible. The incubation phase is about playing with that information to find new patterns and opportunities. And the illumination phase is about those epiphanies that happen when you make nonlinear connections that others might not see. I am not great at consuming a lot of information while high, so I don’t use cannabis for preparation.

Where cannabis has offered a significant advantage in my career is in the incubation and illumination phases. I like to consume cannabis and write down all the ideas that flow through my mind around a given subject. This is known as divergent thinking. It is essential not to judge your ideas as they come out - that is 100% the enemy of creativity.  Cannabis helps me generate ideas without judgment. I will often use cannabis to factually meditate on the information. It helps me empathize with a target audience and make new connections that create illuminations. Of course, the evaluation phase is about convergent thinking, testing those ideas to see if they make sense - this is something I do without cannabis. However, I certainly use cannabis to build on ideas that come out of this process.

High Herstory: How would you define creativity?

Shawn Gold: Great question because people get caught up in the definition of creativity. And that is where the research on creativity is a bit unreliable. The classic definition of creativity is about “creating something new that has value.” But it is not that simple. Creativity is often a trigger and not a result. And what has value? Especially when it comes to art. 

Like happiness, creativity is a way of traveling more than a destination. Creativity is an individual thing; it is about opening up the aperture of understanding and seeing things in new ways. It is about empathizing with others, experiencing new feelings, expressing yourself, making non-linear connections, experimenting, reinventing, breaking the rules, making mistakes, and having fun. Cannabis can help with all these things.

I break creativity into four categories of thinking: 

Creative Imagination deals mostly with divergent thinking by removing barriers and judgment for more free-flowing and effective brainstorming. 

Creative Awareness, which sees an increase in pattern recognition, allows for a newfound sensitivity to the aesthetic of the world around you. 

Creative Reflection involves looking inwards for self-discovery or memory recollections, which can result in deeper connections of empathy. 

Creative Focus helps make ‘out of the box’ connections possible while rumination on a specific, complex problem. 

3.  What kind of role does weed play when you’re trying to expand your creativity?

Shawn Gold: Cannabis can be a shortcut to unlocking your innate creative ability and increasing your creative output if you choose. 

Cannabis has been used by artists, scientists, and thinkers for thousands of years to help provide the proper mindset to express new ideas. It allows you to live in the moment and embrace new thoughts as they come to you. People tend to feel less inhibited on Cannabis because they can relax and connect more deeply with themselves and their surroundings.

We believe that everyone is born creative; we just repress it. Cannabis can be a great shortcut or 'hack' into one's creative flow state. It tends to stimulate the frontal lobe, which is the brain's area attributed to idea product, and it represses the dorsolateral cortex, which is an area of the brain associated with judgment.

High Herstory: How do empathy and judgment affect the creative process?

Shawn Gold: Cannabis is a creativity maximizer in how it helps you empathize, ideate, reduce judgment and make connections. Cannabis users often experience an enhancement of their empathic skills during a high. Writers may feel that they are better able to slip into another personality and write fiction involving various characters' feelings creatively. For many people, cannabis creates an enhanced ability to see the world through the eyes of others can help to come up with new perspectives and ideas.

Creative thinking exists in a balance between the familiar and the new. It requires exploring the range of possibilities and pushing boundaries everywhere to figure out what works. Creativity is about emotional risk, and judgment becomes a significant inhibitor.

We don't want to risk failing, so we avoid it. This is ironic because very often, success rises out of the ashes of our previous failures.

Here are some guidelines from my creative thinking Journal to avoid some pitfalls:

Limit Judgement. When focusing on creative thinking, it is essential to focus on output and let ideas flow without judgment. Just see what happens and push yourself to challenge your imagination.

Take More Risks. Creative thinking requires a willingness to fail and make mistakes. Very often, the mistake is the creativity.

 Challenge default thinking. We become so accustomed to doing things in a certain way that we lose the ability to break away and think differently. Creative ideas exist in a balance between the familiar and the new.

Minimize Negative Thinking. From an early age, we've learned to analyze and criticize anything new. As an adult, it becomes second nature. Don't let this hold you back.

 Go With your gut. If you feel whimsical, then be whimsical; if irreverent, then be irreverent...but don't pressure yourself to get it right or perfect the creative experiment.

High Herstory: What studies have been done on cannabis and creativity and what is your analysis of the results?

Shawn Gold: Well, when it comes to cannabis and creativity, the case studies are immense. If you think about it, half the songs on Spotify would be gone without cannabis.

However, the science behind cannabis and creativity is relatively light. Studies on cannabis have been limited because it is in a schedule one drug classification.

Another significant issue with studying cannabis and creativity is defining what creativity is and how to measure it. Creativity does not often happen in an isolated moment. Your creativity results from all of your experiences. Your relationship with your parents, the knowledge we have accumulated, your fear of judgment, and so many other things we bring to each moment. So, it isn't easy to have a control group in studying creativity, as we all approach creativity differently.

One study I read recently was trying to understand if cannabis could make entrepreneurs more creative.  They took twenty entrepreneurs and gave them a task. Ten of them consumed cannabis, and ten of them (the control group) did not.  They looked at the results in this restrictive time period. Maybe experiments work that way - but life certainly does not, and neither does the creative process.

High Herstory: Does focusing on creative thinking apply only to artists and writers?

 Shawn Gold: There is an excellent Twyla Tharp quote that answers your question.

"Creativity is not just for artists. It's for business people looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way. In the future of AI and outsourcing, creativity will be an essential skill that means job security."

We live in an explosion of creativity, and it's only accelerating. Each human has the capacity to drink in the world and produce something that has never existed before.

So, artists, writers, and designers are a very small subset of creative thinkers. Anyone who creates and innovates in their job or life is a creative thinker. They can be scientists, engineers, educators, computer programmers, doctors, shop clerks, or police officers.  People who solve problems are creative thinkers. Our economy is propelled forward by creativity and technology.

High Herstory: What kind of cannabis products would you suggest for heightened creativity?

Shawn Gold: While cannabis, and the million variations of strains, can affect everyone differently, there tend to be a variety of strains (based on survey data) the more consistently enhance imagination.

Together with the scientists at AbstraxLabs, we have analyzed hundreds of cannabis strains that index high for creativity, along with secondary and tertiary states of mind. After identifying the common cannabinoid and terpene profiles of each cannabis strain, we’ve built a matrix of strains that we blend together for specific creative impact. This ongoing research is supported by focus groups and feedback from iconic creative leaders.

Creativity is a competitive edge in both life and work. It defines us as individuals and gives us a sense of accomplishment in everything we do.

Keep in mind that before you rush into using cannabis to elevate your creative output, be mindful of your strain of choice, dosage and environment. Yes scientific and anecdotal evidence from cannabis users suggest that it enhances creativity.

Remember the Steve Jobs quote: “The best way I could describe the effect of the marijuana and hashish is that it would make me relaxed and creative.” Research agrees and suggests that aspects of creative performance can be improved with cannabis but…..

Start with a lower THC dose and build from there. Studies have shown that higher THC content can actually impair divergent thinking, promote anxiety or cause racing thoughts. Some creative experiences will call for an edible (long painting or sculpting sessions) while another vaporizing (brainstorming or writing).

Strains that contain a ratio of THC to CBD can be helpful, as CBD can stimulate a more focused and productive session. A sleepy strain will not motivate creative work nor will a strain that makes you feel couch-locked. You want to feel open and ready, with stamina and composure to get things done.

Finally, make sure your surroundings are conducive to creativity. For some, this might mean an organized, de-cluttered space brightly lit with music, while others may prefer to explore a messy desk, making connections between various items, and listen to ambient sounds.

While science suggests that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a crucial role in the cognitive functions necessary for creative thinking and cannabis can enhance that experience, the mind tools you choose will help determine how far you can push your creative boundaries. 

Check out Pilgrim Soul’s Cannabis Products:

You find a store that carries Pilgrim Soul’s products here.

RESEARCH: HOW CANNABIS WORKS ON THE BRAIN

Article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4336648/

https://medmen.com/blog/lifestyle/how-weed-enhances-creativity

Divergent & convergent thinking study on cannabis

Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive compound present in the Cannabis sativa plant, has been found to reduce inhibitory control (McDonald et al. 2003) and stimulate striatal dopamine (DA) release (Bossong et al. 2009; Kuepper et al. 2013). These features of THC intoxication, in turn, are expected to play a role in particular aspects of creative thinking (Akbari Chermahini and Hommel 2010; Hommel 2012).