Art Can Get You High. No Drugs Required.

From music and movies to video games and porn, creators and psychologists explain why some cultural experiences hit your nervous system like a substance.

Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado used to say that we often play with drugs to manipulate our psyche like a pianist would play the notes on a keyboard. Tap-tap-tap. With a little help, the puppeteer of the mundane can also manipulate the universal. And as humans are creatures of rituals, protocols, and confinement, imagination can be their escape route to other possible worlds.

Have you by chance ever played Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation 5? Experienced firsthand that viscous nectar of dystopia and decadence? Cyberpunk 2077 is a video game flooded with drugs, with substances that loom between sensory experience, mental escapism, and the power of abilities. And behind that joystick, pressing those buttons, wielding those fingers, controlling that character, lies the consciousness that precedes existence: could the imagination work like psychoactive substances do?

Even if you’ve never touched a controller, you’ve felt the same thing after a song, a film, a novel, a painting, or a scene that rearranged your mood in seconds.

In that sense, psychology suggests that the rewards we get from cultural products (music, film, video games, literature, you name it) are similar to those obtained by consuming certain substances. Basically, because the biological basis is the same. Let’s return to Cyberpunk 2077: the game’s chemistry produces a mental chemistry. As the American writer George William Curtis said, “Imagination is as good as many voyages… and how much cheaper!” With a balanced energy, a little bit of PlayStation gaming can evoke shivers worthy of the finest metaphysical abstractions.

However, psychologist and video game expert Nicolás Crescenzi offers some specific considerations: “It’s like saying ‘anything with a wheel is a vehicle,’ and that’s not how it works. A mill has a wheel, but it won’t take you anywhere.” So what then? Well: “A cultural experience can exhilarate, move, make you laugh and cry, and yet it won’t alter your perception or necessarily influence your decision-making the way some substances do.” Darn it!

But it doesn’t end there. Because, as Adrián Dárgelos of Babasónicos sings in “Mientras Tanto” (Meanwhile): “No one knows why they’re here.” So, for that very reason, each of us travels their own sensory journey, each one navigates their own introspective passage.

Luciano Saracino, a prolific writer and screenwriter who has published (hold on to your socks) about 121 books, written more than 200 episodes of animated and television series, and directed 2 films, warns that consuming cultural products for extended periods of time leads to “a certain attachment and dependence.” His approach is to consume them to the core… and let whatever has to happen, happen.

Recently, the Argentinian Saracino finished writing the script for Batman: The World for DC Comics itself, and he admits that he needs to consume cultural products every single day. “I feel like there’s something that draws me to consuming, that it’s become a habit. And it can trigger flashes of inspiration. For example, I’m reading a Richard Matheson story and I think, ‘How did he do that?’ You enter a trippy mental space, which triggers something in you. The other day I saw a movie where a guy was doing coke and having a bad trip. And I thought, ‘How great it would be to make a bad vibe movie like the one I’m watching.’ Right away, I went and started writing a bad vibe movie,” Saracino said.

In that sense, the American filmmaker Dustin Ferguson, director of films like Seed: Legacy, Spider Baby, and Witchcraft XVII, and self-proclaimed daily weed user, admits that said herb “awakens creativity” and helps him maintain “a certain level of enthusiasm for what I do.” Sure, Ferguson has been smoking pot since he was 17, when he found out it helped with some health problems he was going through.

Ferguson knows that horror films, the genre he usually works with in his productions, produce “dopamine rushes in the same way that drugs do.” Exposure to scares, guts, gore, psychopathy, and intense, terrifying moments provides highs. “I also get highs filming them, and knowing that others will feel them too,” the filmmaker confesses.

Once again, science comes to our aid, to offer some approximations and, perhaps, some certainties: “Stimulating experiences exist because consuming cultural products can create nonexistent universes and has an amazing symbolic charge. But there’s a distance between this and the concept of ‘drugs,’” Crescenzi clarifies. Consuming cultural products produces rewards, experiences, compensations, and positive reinforcements that vary, let’s say, depending on each person’s psychological makeup. And there, among those who surrender to farce, tragedy, or the adventure of the imagination, are those who embrace it as a soothing flight… and those who conceive of it as an active agent, that works by virtue of will.

For some professionals, imagining is a job, and is quite similar to thinking, especially for those who sculpt from malleable creative material.

Paraguayan comedian Camilo “Siamese Cat” Acosta readily agrees, knowing that his imagination often leads him to “dead ends,” and that’s why, when crafting his jokes and routines, he doesn’t stifle his needs: “I don’t force anything, I try to let my imagination come to me,” the comedian says.

In the case of Saracino, who explores inner worlds beyond the tangible and has used various substances to discover every corner of his creative mind, he understands the power of imagination and, consequently, the thresholds certain drugs can open. “Substances tend to put you in a place you’re not usually in, and that can work in favor of the imagination. In my case, I open the door to imagination on one side, and leave the door to substances on the other,” the screenwriter adds.

But come on! Even healthcare professionals incorporate some inherently trippy aspects into their routines. As Crescenzi says: “I find a path in moments of daydreaming, and they are a ticket to my dream world. I daydream, and that’s where I take the opportunity to find the voice to write. It’s my creative process, and it helps me think about surreal universes, characters, and situations.” He smokes amidst moments of calm, to diverge in his own way, stimulating himself with his imagination. “Our imagination rules the world,” as Ferguson states.

But is there a way to stimulate trippy states of mind through consuming cultural products? Psychologist Damián Supply, specializing in digital media, points to meditation and mindfulness as one of the possible answers. “It’s more about integrating the physical and the biological realms,” Supply notes. “Through certain states of consciousness that can be generated through meditation, I see a closeness to the dreamscape, which is a distinct category from wakefulness.”

Consuming some cultural products requires a mind with a certain predisposition, in a way similar to drugs. “You are working on your own sensitivity and perspective, which is very much like dreaming, characteristic of metaphorical languages and that sensitivity that allows you to trip and connect. It’s not just about thought, but about exploring other issues and creating a space where you can start to trip,” Supply ventures.

Ultimately, the mind and its fringes work like a muscle in constant training. Which requires sensitivity, listening… and permissions that the mind grants itself. It’s not so much about the strength of that will as it is about said permissions that the mind allows. Philosophers have long used the idea of a “state of nature” to describe what’s left when social scripts fall away, a raw mental territory where perception can loosen and recombine.

Thus, a movie, a video game, a novel, a comic book, or an album can take you to other places, foregoing that extra something, that magic spice that drugs can provide. “Create your own dream and you’ll never be trapped in a nightmare,” Ferguson suggests. “All of this has to do with chemistry; something activates in the mind and the door opens,” Saracino concludes. Art happens outside and gets inside, like a virus, like when a drug — any drug — smuggles fantasy candies straight into you.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash