[nebulousthree]

Your description of your experience with cannabis is telling. If you're frustrated with not being able to hold a thought for more than 5 seconds, then that might mean that you went into it with expectations of how it should go, and then spent your time being high trying to retain the "control" you had sober and bring those expectations to reality. This is a common mistake. The good parts of cannabis come from letting go of expectations of control. It's in letting go that hyper focused states or creative bursts can happen.

Not everyone is able to "let go" at will, but some can do it intuitively while others may have anxieties regarding control that must be worked through.

[starkd]

But theoretically, the cannabis should have helped that. I also felt a lot of nerve twitches all over. It might have been too high THC, but it was not an experience that I cared to repeat.

For the kind of experience you are talking about, I would think psychadelics would probably be the better fit.

[armitron]

If you have control problems with cannabis, I suggest you stay well away from psychedelics. Everything that you mentioned regarding your cannabis experience is something that you learn to integrate and eventually move past, to super-creative super-introspective states that you can harness for growth and value. You can learn to guide the experience while you're undergoing it.

Psychedelics are in a different class in that there is no guiding the experience while it's happening. The best one can do is prepare the context (set & setting) and hope for the best. In that sense, they're a lot more difficult to handle than cannabis, but also potentially orders of magnitude more rewarding. But to reap those rewards, I feel that one needs to deploy -if only temporarily- a different model of looking at the world: more like a shaman treating the substances like sacraments, with awe and respect, than a cold rationalist.