Beer Splash Part 1: Love beer? Grab this new excuse

CHICAGO:  

Grapes and men have a special equation, since ages, whether nomads or sages.

For some reason, this mysterious bond has always been celebrated around tavern tables but forbidden on the hallowed desks of work. If wine is promised in heaven what makes it so blasphemous in office? Isn’t work another form of worship?

Well, drinking the lesser-mortal’s mug of coffee, I can write on and on, scribbling these foggy assumptions to no avail. But that’s now how everyone works.

Away from the happy oblivion of beer bars and business cocktail parties, something was happening. Something that could turn many a man’s fantasy real some day, of having a beer pitcher next to his computer at the very centre of his cubicle. And if not that, to at least pour the first round of conversations around this idea in that glass half empty.

That storm in a vodka glass had started brewing. At University of Illinois Chicago, where Jennifer Wiley and his peers were busy with alcohol, albeit for a different reason.

A target sample of 40 male social drinkers aged 21—30, recruited by Craigslist and from the university community were about to be studied for a special question that would have implications for many HR managers, bosses, CEOs, project managers and of course, a lot of employees.

Of these 40 males, twenty were in the alcohol intoxication condition and twenty in the sober comparison condition. Needless to say, individuals were excluded from participating if they showed signs of problem drinking behaviors (scoring above a 3 on the Short Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test) or medical contraindications (e.g., heart or liver disease, psychiatric disorders).

The experiment started and what followed was more than a lab hangover.

This experiment was an attempt to answer a very old but seldom-confronted question. 

Can alcohol help making the mind work better, especially for problems that demand lateral answers?

The results couldn’t have been more interesting than the very hypothesis though. Published under the title ‘Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving’; are some mind-stirring insights by Andrew F. Jarosz, Gregory J.H. Colfesh, Jennifer Wiley from the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago.

The nature of creativity and its causes is a topic that has long been of interest, they write in this article. Creative thought drives artistic products and scientific innovations alike, yet the mechanisms underlying great accomplishments have been notoriously difficult to study due to the rarity of these events, they add. This thought takes a leaf from recent studies with frontal lobe patients also suggest that de?cits in attentional control may positively affect creative problem solving. 

In a blog Harris B. Stratyner, Ph.D., CASAC, too underscored this question: Why do so many young artists think that alcohol and drugs enhance their creativity? 

Poets, writers, composers, painters, musicians, etc. have been oft-condemned to have been caught up in this self-defeating misconception. In ‘A Myth About Alcohol, Drugs and Creativity’, Stratyner argues that part of it has to do with the pleasure center of the brain that the chemicals impact - perhaps making one falsely believe they are more creative. That explains all the research looking at the impact of alcohol and drugs on the neurotransmitter dopamine, and its relationship to making us pay attention to increase our interest.

Are you nodding along? No? Yes?

Have you ever experienced a strange spike in ideas after a nice sleep or a nice drink?

Well, 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.

In ‘The Creative Mind’ by Douglas Eby, there are a few instances that align with this seemingly preposterous argument. Beethoven reportedly drank wine about as often as he wrote music. This assumption can be too far-fetched, but just to note what is also mentioned here that he was an alcoholic or at least a problem-drinker. At least five U.S. writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature have been considered alcoholics.

Now that can be the bartender’s dream of juggling apples and oranges together. But there’s no denying that, many talented, creative people have used drugs and alcohol, as Eby observes. Some think a substance will help them be more inspired or productive. Aldous Huxley, Poe, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams are some names he cites here. 

So did this experiment prove that alcohol may work in favour of work rather than against it all the time?

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Back to ‘Uncorking the Muse’: Upon arrival, weight, an initial breathalyzer reading, and consent were obtained, and participants ate a weight-adjusted snack of bagels. After the meal, participants completed the first OSpan task, then received a vodka cranberry drink. 

The dose of alcohol (100-proof Smirnoff vodka) was calibrated by weight (.88 g/kg body weight), and was mixed in front of the participant at a 1:3 vodka to cranberry juice ratio. The drink was administered in three equal doses over 10 min periods. Participants watched an animated feature film (Ratatouille) while they consumed the alcoholic beverages. After they reached peak intoxication (about an hour into the study), participants completed the second Ospan task. Participants in the sober comparison condition engaged in the same tasks as the intoxication condition including watching Ratatouille, but they did not complete the intoxication procedures (e.g., they did not eat the snack and did not drink a beverage).

Individuals were brought to blood alcohol content of approximately .075, and, after reaching peak intoxication, completed a battery of RAT items. Results are interpreted from an attentional control perspective.

And now read this (or may be run to show this to your boss): Intoxicated individuals solved more RAT items, in less time, and were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. 

On average, intoxicated individuals tended to rate their experience of problem solving as being more insightful (M = 3.98) than the sober participants.  The results of the current study supported the prediction that moderate alcohol intoxication would improve performance on a creative problem solving task. Intoxicated participants not only showed an improvement in RAT accuracy compared to sober, WMC-matched participants, but they also solved problems more quickly. Additionally, participants in the intoxicated condition perceived their problem solving to be less analytic and more intuitive than the sober controls.

But why would that happen? Isn’t alcohol the very antithesis of prudence and control?

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As it turns out, the degree and the context give new answers.

The article shows 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. 

Increased attentional control implies that one is better able to screen out peripheral information, which, while useful during analytical problem solving, would be disadvantageous in a situation where the assimilation of information outside of the perceived problem space may be useful.

So if you are working on an accounting problem (unless one where people need creativity for completely different reasons of course), alcohol may not be a good advice. That’s because intoxicated individuals had particularly poor memory for sequentially presented items, while their memory for simultaneous lists was relatively unimpaired compared to sober participants. Yes, alcohol impairs strategy use and processes involved in encoding and retrieving sequences.

But if you are working on whipping up a new marketing thingamajig or a radical way of solving your customer’s pain points or even a new route to crack that labyrinthine flowchart, alcohol is not all Satan. Intoxicated individuals solved more RAT items, in less time, and were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. 

What is however worth paying attention here are two reasons he mentions as drivers for alcohol use by creative folks: enhancing imagination or awareness. In a previous research, Sayette, Reichle, and Schooler (2009) found that moderate intoxication increased instances of mind wandering in a sample of male social drinkers. In that study it was observed that intoxicated participants were more likely to zone out (and not realize it) when they were supposed to be attending to a target cognitive task.

And that helps innovation, it seems.

Why? May be because you are not as right-brained as your boss would like you to be?

Going back to scientific specifics, the work discusses how the two hemispheres may be attuned to particular types of processing, with the left hemisphere specializing in using fine-processing to narrow the activation in the semantic network to one predominant or a few closely related concepts, while the right hemisphere uses coarse processing to activate a broad, diffuse array of remote associates. It is only after the strong activation of the most dominant associates by the left hemisphere is reduced that the weaker, more diffuse activation of the more distant associates by the right hemisphere can rise to the surface.

Alcohol, moderate intoxication and its impact on better work output and more creative solutions can sound like a katzenjammer for now. It’s not for monks. Then what about wonks?

As Stratyner also asked: Forget creativity for a moment, if you have trouble driving a car on alcohol or other drugs, wouldn't it stand to reason it might be harder to play an instrument, coordinate a paintbrush, mold a lump of clay?

Alcohol as a steroid at workplace-this kind of thought can sound stultifying but the researchers have highlighted ‘caveat emptor’ areas clearly enough.

“While detrimental for analytic problem solving, this is exactly the type of dynamic required for success in creative problem solving This in turn begs for continuing research using conceptually related measures, such as classical insight problems, and other measures of executive control to generalize these findings.” Andrew F. Jarosz, Gregory J.H. Colfesh, and Jennifer Wiley’s research is fascinating for sure. Something many geeks would like their managers to stumble upon in their narrow, boring, bespectacled, myopic corridors probably.

The findings sound delicious when it comes to chewing the cud. This way or another, they would create some stir in the pitchers called HR, and Leadership. What may be a good idea academically and wistfully, may be an outrageous non-negotiable for many bosses (including even the more iconoclastic ones with maverick approaches already). We will explore that ‘other side of the bar’ in the next piece. But before that how about what Rumi said about wine-lovers in another era. 

Oh, by the way, Rumi, the great poet himself, was a teetotaler by choice. 

Cheers!