A moderate consumption of alcohol helps you to be more creative

The March 2012 online edition of the journal Consciousness and Cognition included an article coauthored by Jennifer Wiley, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, along with two graduate students, titled Uncorking the Muse: Alcohol Intoxication Facilitates Creative Problem Solving Here is what these researchers actually did:

Beginning with a group of 40 men, none of whom were identified as alcoholics or problem drinkers, half were given a mix of vodka and cranberry juice, enough to bring their blood alcohol level to 0.75, or just shy of the legal limit of .08. The other half did not drink anything. Both groups were then given two tests, one that involves memorizing words and one involving “word association” that asks people to think of a word that “goes with” a series of words, such as “apple, banana, _________.”

What did they find? They found that the intoxicated group did better on the word association test, but worse on the memory test. So, does that prove that drinking makes men smarter? Well, that depends in part of what your idea of “smarter” is. For example, what role does memory play in intelligence (and creativity)? And how exactly does word association relate to creative success?

The relative performance of these two groups was measured in a highly-controlled setting. We have no way of knowing what the results would be if we compared, say, a group of four-beers-a-day men to a group of men who drank two beers two or three days a week.