Ugh I'm just not very creative! How am I supposed to know what to write about? What's a whale interested in anyway? Ugh.. I don't know! This is frustrating! Damn it, I am just going to drink a beer and maybe inspiration will strike.

Does the above depiction seem familiar to you? I am sure it does to many of us Steemians. Creativity is not something that comes easily to many of us (especially us boring scientists!). Anecdotally we all know that drinking a beer (or your alcoholic beverage of choice) can get the creative juices flowing. However there is often a great divide between what "everybody knows" and what can be supported by real experimental evidence. With regards to alcohol and creativity however, we just may be in luck...

Today we will be discussing an article published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition titled "Creativity on tap? Effects of alcohol intoxication on creative cognition." Where the authors were exploring this idea that alcohol stirs up our creativity. Lets pour a tall glass of science and see if we like what the authors found.

Image Source

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What Were The Authors Of This Study Looking At Specifically?

The authors were looking at the effects of being a little bit intoxicated (blood alcohol level of 0.03) on their abilities to perform some mental tasks. They divided the participants up into two groups: one which was given a single alcoholic beer (to lead to that 0.03 blood alcohol level) and another which was given a non-alcoholic beer (this was the placebo group). Both groups thought they were receiving a standard alcohol containing beer.

They were trying, as we discussed above, to scientifically understand whether alcohol supports creative thinking by reducing inhibitions, or if it actually only impairs cognitive functioning and leads to no or worsened creative thinking. Perhaps all that anecdotal, alcohol makes me more creative, is just the alcohol talking? (I know how amazing I think I am at everything when I've been drinking... however the reality is a bit less amazing and a lot more embarrassing).

What Is Creative Thinking?

From the scientific perspective, creative thinking is that which uses both goal-oriented as well as spontaneous non-directed mental processes. [2] This usually refers to thinking used to generate new ideas or rearrange a problem to come up with a unique solution. Creatively generating ideas is referred to as "divergent thinking" and the ability to think in this way is correlated strongly to an individuals intelligence. [3] (intelligence or actual intellectual capacity takes many forms and is not limited only to our abilities to remember things but also Fluid Intelligence which is the intelligence of solving problems!)

Creativity Is Associated With Being Uninhibited

More than just our innate abilities, being creative has also been shown to be associated with disinhibition. [4] What this means is that when we are solving problems we often get stuck thinking one way ( a "mental impasse") and being creative requites that we get passed that. What researchers have shown in the past is that the ability to break our focus can actually lead us to be MORE creative, and disinhibition can contribute to this break in focus.

How Did The Authors Measure Creativity?

They used a few methods, one called a Remote Associates Test which is a word association test, where participants are asked to find the relationship between three common words. The researchers also employed Divergent Thinking Tasks in which people are asked to do some out of the box thinking, for instance providing some examples of unusual uses for a common object like a brick or a pen.

What Did They Find?

Figure 1 [1

So in the above image we are looking at results from the two creative thinking experiment sets, on the left we have the Remote Associate Test (RAT) and on the right we have the divergent thinking task. T1 is before treatment (so before the beer) and T2 is after the treatment (so after the beer). The White bar is the placebo group (received the non-alcoholic beer) and the grey bar is the test group (received the normal alcoholic beer).

What do you see?

This data shows that alcohol improved the participants performance on the word association (RAT) test, but did not do anything to the performance on the divergent thinking test.

Do you think this is odd? Why do you think this might be? They both assess creative thinking.

What Did The Authors Report About This Data?

The authors state that this data is evidence that alcohol improved participants creative problem solving abilities, but did not help their out of the box thinking (divergent thinking). More importantly here, was their observation that alcohol did not make divergent thinking WORSE.

So in none of the tests for creative thinking did any of the participants fare worse when consuming a small amount of alcohol. In fact their performance was improved! What is perhaps even more interesting is that their creative problem solving abilities (as judged by the RAT test) improved even with placebo! So just thinking that you are drinking some alcohol makes you a better problem solver (perhaps thinking about alcohol will help us solve the problem of what to post next!)

What Was New Here?

Evidence wise not a lot. Scientific validity wise a ton!

The illustration that alcohol improves creative problem solving was actually shown before in a 2012 study. [6] However the authors of that study did not include a placebo group, so this current study both supports their work and provides a badly needed control. With out a negative placebo control we couldn't be certain that the creativity increase was because of the alcohol (which now we can).

Author Conclusions

Our study corroborates the notion that small attenuations of cognitive control may facilitate certain aspects of creative cognition while not affecting others...The findings, however, should not be
overgeneralized by assuming that creativity is generally supported by alcohol. Beneficial effects are likely restricted to very modest amounts of alcohol, whereas excessive alcohol consumption typically impairs creative productivity.

What to take from this? Well obviously as the authors state in their conclusions, their data doesn't show any evidence that pounding shots will do anything for your creativity. Remember these participants drank only one beer and had a very low blood alcohol content. Additionally not all types of creative thinking were benefited at all, only a specific subset of that type of thinking.

My Thoughts

Drinking a lot of alcohol is obviously not healthy for us, however there is plenty of evidence that a very moderate, low amount of consumption is either not bad, or potentially even positive. Perhaps that is enough to say if you are struggling making that creative jump, try drinking a beer. It just might help you find some inspiration.

Sources

Text Sources

1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810016303713
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24898118
3. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.4219/jsge-2005-473
4. https://sites.northwestern.edu/markbeemanlab/files/2015/11/The-cognitive-neuroscience-of-insight-1jie1hg.pdf
5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232480788_Assessing_Creativity_With_Divergent_Thinking_Tasks_Exploring_the_Reliability_and_Validity_of_New_Subjective_Scoring_Methods
6. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012000037

Image Sources

1. Image 1
2. Image 2
3. Image 3

All Non Cited Images Are From Pixabay.com, Flickr.com, Pexels.com, or Wikipedia.com And Are Available For Reuse Under Creative Commons Licenses

Any Gifs Are From Giphy.com and Are Also Available for Use Under Creative Commons Licences

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