There Are Lots of Famous Drunk Artists, but No Famous Drunk Accountants
While caffeine pulls a number on your brain to make you feel like you have more energy, alcohol has it’s own way of influencing your creativity. After you’ve had a couple beers, drinking makes you less focused as it decreases your working memory, and you begin to care less about what’s happening around you.
But as researchers at the University of Chicago discovered, this can be a good thing for creativity’s sake.
The researchers devised a game where 40 men were given three words and told to come up with a fourth that could make a two-word combination with all three words.
For example, the word “pit” works with “arm”, “peach”, and “tar”:
Half of the men drank two pints of beer before playing the game, while the other half drank nothing. The results showed that men who drank solved 40 percent more of the problems than sober men.
It was concluded that a blood alcohol level of 0.07 (about two drinks) made the participants better at creative problem-solving tasks, but not necessarily working memory tasks where they had to pay attention to things happening in their surroundings (like driving a car).
By reducing your ability to pay attention to the world around you, alcohol frees up your brain to think more creatively. It looks like author Ernest Hemingway was on to something when he said:
When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?
