Here’s some good news for those of you looking forward to the
weekend: A little wine or beer may make you more creative. Researchers at the
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) found that moderate alcohol consumption
can reduce people’s ability to pay attention (as anyone who’s ever been drunk
can attest), which frees them up for creative problem-solving tasks. In other
words, after a few beers you might not be able to solve a math problem, but you
may be able to answer a riddle.
Scientists at UIC administered vodka-cranberry cocktails
calibrated to each participant’s body weight—which they drank while watching
the animated movie Ratatouille, for some reason—until they had a
blood-alcohol level of .07. They were then asked to solve math problems while
remembering a series of words, which they did moderately well.
The surprise came during the second task, when they were
presented with word-association problems that required more creative answers.
The intoxicated participants correctly answered more problems in less time, and
they described their answers as being more intuitive (an “It just came to me!”
mindset) than their sober counterparts did. UIC researchers published their
findings in the journal Consciousness and Cognition and
theorized that alcohol caused them to pay less attention to the “distracting”
first task, which gave them better access to “solution cues that would
otherwise be ignored.”
So the next time you get drunk, don’t apologize for acting
stupid. Just tell everyone you’re being creative.
Suddath is a staff writer for Bloomberg
Businessweek.
Short Communication
Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving
Andrew F. Jarosz ⇑, Gregory J.H.
Colflesh, Jennifer Wiley
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1007
W. Harrison St. MC 285, Chicago, IL 60647, United States
Abstract:
That alcohol provides a benefit to creative processes has long
been assumed by popular culture,but to date has not been tested. The current
experiment tested the effects of moderate alcohol intoxication on a common creative
problem solving task, the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Individuals were
brought to a blood alcohol content of approximately .075, and, after reaching
peak intoxication, completed a battery of RAT items. Intoxicated individuals
solved more RAT items, in less time, and were more likely to perceive their
solutions as the result of a sudden insight. Results are interpreted from an
attentional control perspective.
1. Introduction
The nature of creativity and its causes is a topic that has long
been of interest. Creative thought drives both artistic products and scientific
innovations, yet the mechanisms underlying great accomplishments have been
notoriously difficult to study due to the rarity of these events. A popular
belief is that altered cognitive processing, whether due to insanity, sleep state,
mood, or substance use, may spark creativity among artists, composers, writers
and problem solvers.
The use of alcohol in particular (alone or in combination with
other substances) has been linked to the accomplishments of many great
individuals including Beethoven, Poe, Hemingway, Coleridge, Pollock, and
Socrates.
Despite this, most investigations of alcohol and creativity are
case studies or correlational studies, with little work demonstrating the
connection empirically
(Norlander, 1999;
Plucker, McNeely, & Morgan, 2009).
Why might intoxication lead to improved creative problem solving?
One promising mechanism is the effect that alcohol has on executive functioning
in combination with previous observations that sometimes a reduced ability to
control one’s attention can have positive implications for select cognitive
tasks, including creative problem solving tasks
(Kim, Hasher, & Zacks,
2007; Ricks, Turley-Ames, & Wiley, 2007;
see Wiley & Jarosz, 2012, for a review).
The role of individual differences in executive function and how
they affect problem solving is a topic that has received a considerable amount
of attention.
Much of this work has used working memory capacity (WMC) as
assessed by complex span tasks as a measure of executive function (see Engle, 2002)
and has focused on the relation of WMC to analytical problem solving (see, for
example, Kane et al., 2004) and mathematical problem solving (see Ashcraft & Guillaume, 2009, for a review). In these areas working memory capacity
is often considered as the ability to control one’s attention (Engle, 2002),
and increased working memory capacity generally leads to superior problem
solving performance. Recently, however, the role of executive function in
creative problem solving has been receiving increasing attention. Creative
problem solving, as opposed to analytical problem solving, does not involve
computational algorithms or incremental analytic procedures. Instead creative
problem solving tends to be characterized by more divergent, associational or
discontinuous solution processes.1053-8100/$ - see front matter _ 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights
reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.002
⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 312 413 4122. E-mail addresses: ajaros5@uic.edu
(A.F. Jarosz), colflesh@gmail.com
(G.J.H. Colflesh), jwiley@uic.edu
(J. Wiley).
Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at SciVerse
ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition journal
homepage:
Please cite this article in press as: Jarosz, A. F., et al.
Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Consciousness
and Cognition (2012), doi:10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.002
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