On June 16, 2025, thousands of researchers, clinicians, therapists, policymakers, and advocates will converge in Denver, Colorado, for Psychedelic Science 2025: The Integration, the world’s most important gathering focused on psychedelic medicine and research. Hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), this year’s theme—“The Integration”—is both a guiding principle and a rallying cry: to unite the diverse domains of psychedelic inquiry and experience into a coherent, impactful movement for healing and transformation.

For mental health practitioners, PS2025 offers an unparalleled opportunity to stay at the forefront of psychedelic-assisted care. Luminaries like the creator of Internal Family Systems, Dick Schwartz, will be leading workshops integrating traditional therapeutic modalities with psychedelic-assisted ones. With Denver coming online with state-sanctioned therapeutic centers offering psilocybin for treatment, there is no better time or place for this conference. As these therapies move from trials into mainstream clinical practice, practitioners are able to enter a new era of evidence-based treatment and responsibility. With keynotes, panels, and immersive sessions covering therapy models, integration strategies, ethics, training, and cultural competency, PS2025 is a must-attend event for anyone delivering or preparing to deliver psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Spanning five days—June 16 to 20—PS2025 begins with two days of workshops, the uniquely psychedelic film festival Cinematheque, followed by three days of keynotes, panels, and data-driven presentations across 14 tracks. The Therapy, Trials, and Studies tracks will serve as hubs for practitioners seeking clinical insight and peer-reviewed data.

Sessions in the Therapy Track will explore the nuances of ethical psychedelic care—from dual roles and boundaries to trauma-informed frameworks and consent models. Speakers like Joseph McCowan will emphasize culturally competent approaches that avoid retraumatization and expand access to underserved populations.

The Trials Track will provide updates on Phase 2 and 3 research, including psilocybin for MDD, and MDMA for PTSD. With new scrutiny on trial protocols and FDA pathways, practitioners will gain clarity on what constitutes safe, legal, and effective treatment as this space matures.

The Black Liberation Track, led by thought leaders such as Dr. Darron Smith and Charlotte James, centers on psychedelic healing in the context of systemic oppression and generational trauma. These sessions will address how practitioners can offer culturally responsive care, build trust in marginalized communities, and decolonize therapeutic practices.

Meanwhile, the Veterans Track will highlight the use of psychedelics in treating PTSD, moral injury, and chronic pain. Veteran advocates like Jesse Gould of Heroic Hearts Project and Dr. Bob Koffman, a retired Navy psychiatrist, will speak to the unique clinical considerations of working with military and first responder populations, and the protocols needed to support their long-term healing.

MAPS founder Rick Doblin’s curated “Doblin Track” provides a 30-year arc of context for today’s practitioner: how we got here, what’s next, and how to build a future of care rooted in both science and wisdom traditions.

Practitioners will also benefit from sessions in the Policy Track, which unpacks how changing state and federal regulations affect clinical access, credentialing, and insurance.

For practitioners stepping into this next chapter of care, Psychedelic Science 2025 isn’t just a conference—it’s a catalyst for evolution in practice, connection, and purpose.

​​We hope that you’ll join us in Denver this June. Use promo code PSYT15 for 15% off registration on all conference passes, including our Practitioner Pass. 

Learn more and register by visiting psychedelicscience.org.

Have you ever hit a creative roadblock on a project or a problem you need to solve? Chances are, there might be a psychedelic for that.

Despite their recent focus on medical and mental health benefits, psychedelics have long been linked to creativity and insight. And in light of the FDA’s recent decision to withhold approval for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, it’s become more important than ever to cultivate a wider view around psychedelics and their potential to shape and influence our lives.

The exploration of psychedelics as tools for creative breakthroughs offers profound potential to expand our understanding of how these substances influence the human mind beyond their medical and therapeutic applications. In the Vital psychedelic training program, we incorporate these ideas, especially for those pursuing careers as coaches and wellness practitioners.

Throughout this article, we’ll examine how these substances have been used to help people boost creativity, gain insights, and enhance problem-solving abilities – and the science behind it.

Unlocking Creativity Through Psychedelics

Whether encountered through a sudden flash of insight in “Eureka!” moments, or through a lengthy process of deep ideation, creativity is a mysterious force that allows us to connect information in new and unexpected ways. Often, it can lead to new understandings that help us adapt to an ever-changing world.

Historically, psychedelics have long played a role in inspiring creative genius and fostering insight. From Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whose iconic poem “Howl” was inspired by his psychedelic experiences, to Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who credited LSD with helping him discover the structure of DNA, these substances have shaped some of the most influential minds in history. Even Steve Jobs described LSD as “one of the most important things” he did in his life, underscoring the transformative role psychedelics have played in sparking innovation and artistic expression.

Biochemist Kary Mullis credits his use of LSD in playing a vital role in his discovery of how to automate the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a pioneering breakthrough which earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

Although the discovery did not come about while directly under the influence of LSD, it helped him to “inhabit” DNA molecules from a new perspective.

“PCR’s another place where I was down there with the molecules when I discovered it and I wasn’t stoned on LSD, but my mind by then had learned how to get down there. I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymerase go by,” Mullis said.

More recently, astrobiologist Bruce Damer came out of the psychedelic closet, sharing how psychedelics, in combination with other consciousness-expanding practices, helped him arrive at what is now a widely cited hypothesis on the origins of life.

“My own story is that an interweaving of endogenous preparation and meditation combined with a low dose of ayahuasca led to a breakthrough to the scientific question of how life could have begun on the Earth, four billion years ago. The telling of this story led to the formation of the Center for MINDS,” he explained.

A newly formed nonprofit, MINDS is dedicated to exploring how psychedelics and other consciousness-expanding practices can play a role in creative problem solving to help our species find innovative solutions to the polycrises of our time.

Unlike other psychedelic organizations, MINDS is focused on what they refer to as “psychedelic-assisted innovation” as an emergent practice that could serve to revitalize the public perception of the value of psychedelics and a yet to be explored path to regulatory approval.

Damer outlines what he perceives as the current pathways to psychedelic access and regulation, including Indigenous and cultural use; personal growth and expression; and therapeutic applications, calling for a so-called “fourth path” in psychedelic research and discourse, utilizing them as tools for creative breakthroughs in science and technology.

“We believe that a next step beyond the therapeutic applications of psychedelic practices is their use as elixirs of creativity. MINDS hopes to validate their effects through science and valorize their practice in our society through established protocols,” Damer told Psychedelics Today.

The Role of Altered States in Creative and Scientific Discoveries

Throughout the ages, mystical, non-ordinary states of consciousness such as dreaming and hypnagogia (the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep) have been linked to creative insight across cultures and disciplines. These states have played a major role in scientific breakthroughs, artistic expression, and technological innovation.

Chemist Friedrich August Kekulé was famously dozing off by his fireplace when he had a vivid vision of molecules transforming into snakes. In this vision, one of the snakes twisted into a circle, forming an ouroboros, a serpent devouring its own tail. This image inspired him to understand that the chemical structure of benzene was, in fact, a closed ring.

Such naturally occurring non-ordinary states of consciousness are similar to psychedelic states in that they allow for a heightened capacity for mental imagery and visualization, sharing more fluid, free-flowing, imagistic, and highly associative patterns of consciousness.

Referring to how individuals like Nikola Tesla envisioned the electric generator and Albert Einstein uncovered the basic principles of his special theory of relativity in non-ordinary states of consciousness, psychiatrist and founding father of transpersonal psychology Stanislav Grof explains, “It is a well-known fact that many important ideas and solutions to problems did not originate in the context of logical reasoning, but in various unusual states of mind – in dreams, while falling asleep or awakening, at times of extreme physical and mental fatigue, or during an illness with high fever.”

A 2022 paper on psychedelics as tools for creative insight examined the way in which dreaming and hypnagogic states overlap with the psychedelic experience, shedding light on shared neurophenomenological and cognitive processes. They suggest that one key feature of creativity is our capacity to have fluid and flexible cognitive processes, shifting between modes of thought such as divergent and convergent thinking. That is, our ability to come up with as many different solutions as possible to a loosely defined problem, versus coming up with a single solution to a well-defined problem.

The authors conclude that, “The psychedelic state may have its own characteristic features making it amenable to creativity enhancement, such as brain hyperconnectivity, meta-cognitive awareness, access to a more dependable and sustained altered state experience, and potential for eliciting sustained shifts in trait openness.”

Exploring the Research on Psychedelics and Creative Problem Solving

In 1966, shortly after LSD was criminalized in the state of California, researchers Willis Harman and James Fadiman published a groundbreaking study examining the role of psychedelics in creative problem-solving, finding that psychedelics were able to enhance creativity.

A group of 27 professionals, including engineers, architects, and mathematicians, were dosed with LSD or mescaline, then put into small, carefully curated working groups. In preparation for the experiment, each participant was instructed to choose one (or more) problems related to their work that required a creative solution.

Participants were able to find solutions to certain problems they had been working on for weeks – and in some cases months – reporting decreased feelings of inhibition, a greater ability to conceptualize the problem in a broader context, enhanced ideation, and heightened capacity for visual imagery. 

“I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of. My mind seemed much freer to roam around the problems, and it was these periods of roaming around which produced solutions… I dismissed the original idea entirely, and started to approach the graphic problem in a radically different way. That was when things began to happen. All kinds of different possibilities came to mind,” said one participant.

The first study of its kind, it is not considered as scientifically rigorous as today’s double-blind, placebo-controlled standards – participants were positively primed for the experience by being instructed that the substances would help enhance their creativity. Even so, it suggests that psychedelics do have the ability to enhance creative problem-solving (set, setting, and intentionality permitting).

A 2016 study explored ayahuasca’s effects on creativity, finding that the brew enhanced performance on tasks related to divergent thinking, while convergent thinking decreased. This impaired ability for convergent thinking is thought to be related to the large dosage of substance given and the strong, sometimes disorienting experiences it can produce.

Compared with practices like microdosing, it has been suggested that higher doses might limit cognitive processing abilities, being potentially too distracting to focus on specific problem-solving activities.

Another study measured psilocybin’s effect of convergent and divergent thinking, finding that even though participants reported feeling more creative, they performed worse on tasks measuring both types of creativity during the experience. However, a week later, when compared to the placebo group, those who ingested psilocybin scored higher on convergent creativity.

It is thought that this could be linked to the way in which psychedelics dampen the activity of the default mode network (DMN), an interconnected group of brain regions associated with introspective functions and internally directed thought, such as self-reflection, and self-criticism during the experience itself. After the acute phase of a psychedelic experience, the DMN connectivity is reconsolidated in a new way, producing neuroplastic changes in the brain, possibly leading to increases in creativity.

The practice of microdosing has also been celebrated for its perceived ability to enhance creativity, being widely used among Silicon Valley tech workers. However, up until recently, the link between microdosing and creativity remained anecdotal. A 2018 study by researchers at Leiden University, gave psilocybin-containing truffles to attendees at a microdosing event hosted by the Dutch Psychedelic Society, inviting participants to take part in two creative problem-solving tasks to measure their divergent and convergent thinking skills. Findings showed that participants scored significantly higher on both convergent and divergent thinking tests after ingesting a microdose.

The Science Behind Psychedelic-Induced Creativity

On the level of personality, psychedelics have been shown to produce enduring openness to new experience. A 2018 study conducted by researchers at Imperial College London, examined the effects of psilocybin on personality structures in patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression. Researchers gave patients two doses of psilocybin a week apart from one another in supportive settings, assessing personality at baseline and then again at a three-month follow-up.

Although the study didn’t directly set out to understand the connection between psychedelics and creativity, it found that psilocybin produced increases in trait “openness” which is linked to “new ideas and values, imagination, aesthetic appreciation, novelty-seeking, non-conformity, and creativity.” However, researchers suggested that such increases in openness might also be linked to psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically.

Another key feature of the psychedelic brain state is increased global connectivity – enhanced communication between brain regions and networks. This shift may underlie the fluid and unconstrained thinking associated with psychedelics, promoting novel perspectives and creative insights.

Psychedelics are also known to induce a state of higher brain entropy, marked by more dynamic and less predictable brain activity, which opens up a greater range of brain states. This “anarchic” state, described in the REBUS model (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics), reduces reliance on prior beliefs and expectations, fostering a richer conscious experience that can enhance creative thinking. By loosening preconceptions – often barriers to creativity – psychedelics may help the mind break free from conventional thought patterns, although this can also diminish the ability to critically evaluate ideas.

The Shadow Side of Psychedelic Insight

One important question to factor when considering creative insights and solutions born from psychedelic reveries is: whether such downloads hold true and find congruence within larger bodies of knowledge, or not.

In a recent scientific review paper, researchers suggest that in the psychedelic state the subjective experience of creative enhancement may not “match the actual ‘quality’ of insights or realizations under the drug – as judged by others.”

As with dreams, psychedelic experiences are often replete with symbols, imagery, and impressions that do not necessarily have a fixed or simple meaning. As with any other type of psychedelic journey, it is important to emphasize the period of integration in which mystical, ineffable insights are carefully distilled into real-world understanding and enduring change. In the case of using psychedelics for creative problem-solving, this process of integration would have to coalesce with larger scientific and industry protocols, continually revisiting, testing, and refining insights through processes of peer review.

In Vital, we stress the importance of discernment and integration when working with these substances. Our program trains participants to support clients in not only navigating the psychedelic experience itself but also in applying their newfound perspectives in a grounded, practical way.

In the past, psychedelics have been heralded as a “magic bullet” or “cure all” for mental health diagnoses as well as looked to as a way to resolve the climate crisis through their ability to shift our relationship with the natural world. In looking to psychedelics as tools for creative problem-solving to help us meet the multiple existential crises that we are facing as a species, it is critical that we tread with caution, not becoming overly zealous in our desire to exalt psychedelics as a simple solution to our collective problems. No doubt, when used with care, they can serve to help us along the path, but only represent one tool in a cadre of others.