Okay, to compress your question slightly, do I think psychedelics will automatically turn people, including scientists, into more innovative thinkers? Definitely not. There are simply too many self-declared prophets today preaching psychedelic power, end-times doctrine and conspiracy theories to make the argument ingestion alone transforms people into more intuitive and capable thinkers.

That said, there's no denying that plenty of people did and do have fairly profound, life-altering, solutions-garnering learning experiences simply by ingesting psychedelics (though, of course, they took substantial risks by doing this).

It seems that "set" -- the personality and learning that we have, as well as our cultural background and expectations of what we can expect from the psychedelic experience -- play an entirely significant role in not just for the nature of a trip, but also for the creative process in general. In addition, the scientists or others attempting to use psychedelics for creativity seem to have to really be strongly motivated to solve the specific problems they work on prior to ingestion.

The scientists in James Fadiman's study were primed to believe they would be better problem solvers through the use of psychedelics. (Or course, by today's standards of study, the proper way to do this would have a control group and variable, give both this sort of encouragement and only one the psychedelics. It'd be a great study -- but, good luck with the approval process.)

Art and science are not so dissimilar as they are often made out to be. They both rely upon many of the same sources for effective creation: the ability to imagine new possibilities, to establish parameters for those possibilities and then to run that initial spark through those parameters, and to (often painstakingly) repair and tweak and redact and surge and try again -- until, if successful, a certain flow based on logic, aesthetics, the properties of electricity, etc. has been established.

There are no shortages of innovators in the humanities and the hard sciences that have spoken about the positive influence of psychedelics on their respective projects. To that end, I want to quote some tech innovators in a roundabout fashion. A friend gave me a new book by Stanislav Grof, who probably guided more people on legal psychedelic trips than anybody in the world, called Healing Our Deepest Wounds. I randomly opened it up before bed last night to p.222, and found that he was speaking about a book I'd cited in my story, What the Dormouse Said, written by NYT tech reporter John Markoff.

What follows is going to be me, retyping Grof who's speaking about Markoff who is quoting some incredibly influential innovators situated in what would become Silicon Valley. (This is hardly what I would do for an article, but hopefully it works here.)

"Douglas Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse, also explored and experimented with psychedelic drugs. Kevin Herbert, who worked for Cisco Systems in the early days, once said: 'When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into another brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing.' Mark Pesce, the co-inventor of virtual reality's coding language, VRML, agreed that there is a definite relationship between chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: 'To a man and a woman, the people behind virtual reality were acidheads.'"

So okay, none of this proves definitely that LSD -- or some other psychedelic -- led directly to virtual reality software and aesthetics. But can't we agree that something interesting seems to be going on here, and wouldn't it be great if researchers were allowed to run rigorously peer-reviewed studies to explore what that something was?