A Study on the Effect of Methylphenidate on Creativity of Healthy Adults

Background:

The past decade has seen a rise in the use of prescription stimulants not only by ADHD-diagnosed individual but also by normal healthy individuals for cognitive enhancement. This resulted in a corresponding escalation of illicit use, particularly in college students (confirmed by numerous survey results). In light of this trend, an important issue concerning the effect of cognitive enhancement on the way people think, or what could be called "cognitive style", was raised. Specifically, there has been concern that stimulants might decrease creativity in people using the drugs for cognitive enhancement(.

Creativity has been defined as the ability to produce responses which are both novel (i.e., original, rare and unexpected) and suitable (i.e., adaptive and useful according to the task constrains; ). Many models have been suggested to explain creativity. According to the well established twofold model of creativity, the creative process begins with an associative generation of crudely formed ideas, which is followed by an expansion and exploration of these ideas through a process of evaluation . Since creativity plays an important role in producing novel and useful ideas , it was further speculated that in case of cognitive enhancers continues to be more widely practiced and indeed impair creativity, the effect on society as a whole could be grave The question of whether stimulants might decrease creativity is yet to be elucidated, given that most of previous studies focused on ADHD-diagnosed children, with mixed results; While some of them found that stimulants maintained creativity, others reported it actually worsened the scores on tasks assessing creativity.

Moreover, despite the increase in both illicit and prescribed stimulant use by healthy adults (discussed above) the study by Farah et al.(2009), is so far the only published report investigating stimulant effects on creativity among these individuals. The authors examined the effect of Adderall (a mixture of amphetamine salts) upon creativity, in 16 healthy adults on four tests of creativity, "two tasks requiring divergent thought and two requiring convergent thought (p. 542)." Only performance on the convergent tasks was affected, and the effect depended on baseline performance: in one case enhancing it, particularly for lower-performing individuals, and in the other case enhancing it for the lower-performing and impairing it for higher-performing individuals. This pattern of differential effect of stimulants based on baseline performance, has been noted in other studies of stimulants and cognition and is not unique to creative thought.

Hence, the question of whether stimulants might decrease creativity in healthy adults using the drugs for cognitive enhancement is still open. To best of our knowledge, though MPH is a widely used by healthy normal individuals to enhance cognition, its effect upon creativity of healthy adults has not been studied before. We therefore sought to investigate the effect of MPH upon creativity in healthy adults.