The pleasure dome with caves of ice. Cerebral lateralization, creativity, and the drug experience

The drug experience is not a phenomenon of isolated interest to the neurosciences. The investigation of the phases of the drug experience can tell us much about the process of stimulating and losing creativity. This paper aimed to present a human model of creativity and the drug experience to complement the existing animal models. It remains for future research to reject or confirm the hypotheses sketched here. The exploration of these hypotheses would give us better insight into the control mechanisms determining the delicate process of creating functional forms that link words and images to feelings (for example, art). The examination of the drug experience from the point of view of cerebral lateralization provides a better understanding of how the quest for art may be tied up with the consequences of self-destruction. As Luria has noted, the gnostic disturbances associated with damages of the right hemisphere are "the remarkable absence of perception of the patient of his own defects; . . . such patients have unimpaired speech but they lack the precise analysis of the direct flow of information about their own body." Perhaps this was intuitively known by Coleridge, who in 1803 had already passed into the maintenance phase and wrote the fragment "Reality's Dark Dream": I know 'tis but a dream, yet feel more anguish Than if 'twere truth. It has been often so: Must I die under it? Is no one near? Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?