Cheers: alcohol might enhance our creativity

SAVANNAH MUL — Staff Writer
Pouring a glass of wine or opening a bottle of beer on a Monday night might not be such a bad idea after all. CBS News reports of a new study done at the University of Illinois in Chicago concluding that a blood alcohol limit of 0.07—keep in mind the legal limit is 0.08—will make a man more creative. Yes, make men more creative.
The men in the study were spilt up, and half the group received alcohol while the other half didn’t. The researchers, psychology professors, gave them a brainteaser test and found the group given alcohol had much higher scores than the group without any alcoholic beverages.
This study was limited and was homogeneous. There were 40 male subjects and no females. How disappointing. I’m not an avid follower of new studies and statistics, but in this particular case I’d want to see the difference of how a woman would react.
Alcohol has a tendency to make people more creative and depending on the individual, make them have a more accepting outlook on certain situations. If women were included in this study as well, we might have had similar results to the men. Everyone at some point in their life must think they are the next Picasso, given a pen and a piece of paper when having a little too many vodka cranberries.
The more alcohol you consume, the more the creative part of your brain is enhanced. But keep in mind when our creative minds grow stronger when under the influence, our ability to focus on larger tasks, like driving a motor, vehicle dwindles.
Reported on the Medical Daily’s website, Jennifer Wiley, the lead author of this study and professor at University of Illinois, found that “alcohol may enhance creativity problem solving by reducing the mind’s working memory capacity, which is the ability to concentrate on something in particular.”
Wiley pointed out that the key discoveries in doing this experiment is that a person who is too focused on a particular subject can be blinded, therefore not seeing all possibilities. Whereas a “more flexible state of attention may be helpful for creative solutions to emerge.”
Well, this might hold some sort of fire for males. My guy friend is a music enthusiast and he enjoys having a few beers, jamming, and then creating rap beats with his friends. The next day he comes into work and tells me about this unbelievable track he and his friends laid down the previous night. I listened to it, and to my surprise it can easily be one of the best tracks he has done.
For him, maybe this study actually holds validity. After all, it only takes three or four beers to reach a blood alcohol level of 0.07. Who knows, maybe that’s why Earnest Hemingway was a great writer. Perhaps all he needed to cure his writer’s block was a few glasses of liquor to get his mind rolling and his pen writing.