[clusterfoo]

To play devil's advocate: could it be that generally curious, risk-taking, meta-thinking individuals tend to make better engineers, which just happens to be a personality type that is naturally drawn to psychedelics?

Really, we can play arm-chair neuroscientist indefinitely, but there is only one way to get to the bottom of this. We must gather more, um, data.

[thibauts]

To create innovative solutions you have to be creative. This includes thinking outside of the box, putting dogma into question, clearing your own paths, and this all translates to connecting concepts that we don't usually connect. Some people do it naturally, some use psychedelics, some do both.

I think cultivating this as an attitude is usually a good thing (in life) and can lead to powerful insights. In fact this is a really cheap way to innovate. Take concepts from one domain, cast them onto another, profit. A cross disciplinary culture helps a lot. I'm sure many people here understand very well what I mean.

So to answer you more precisely, I really have only one data-point and I think both the traits you describe and psychedelics can make interesting (if not better) engineers.