Short Communication
Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.002Get rights and content

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.

Highlights

► We examine the effects of alcohol intoxication on creative problem solving. ► Sober and intoxicated (BAC = .075) individuals solved Remote Associates Test items. ► Intoxicated individuals solved more items in a shorter time compared to sober. ► Intoxicated individuals were more likely to rate their solutions as insightful.

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 et al., 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 et al., 2007, Ricks et al., 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.

One interesting prediction is that superior executive functioning, such as increased attentional control, may in fact be detrimental to reaching creative solutions. 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 (Seifert, Meyer, Davidson, Patalano, & Yaniv, 1995). As such, it is reasonable to suggest that in the case of creative problem solving, less attentional control may in fact be beneficial to solution (Kim et al., 2007, Ricks et al., 2007, Wiley and Jarosz, 2012).

Turning now to the effects of alcohol on executive functioning, there are reasons to believe that intoxication will lead to changes in attentional control. While early work on alcohol intoxication suggested that alcohol may narrow one’s focus of attention (Josephs and Steele, 1990, Steele and Josephs, 1990), recent work has suggested different accounts. For example, Saults, Cowan, Sher, and Moreno (2007) demonstrated that intoxicated individuals had particularly poor memory for sequentially presented items, while their memory for simultaneous lists was relatively unimpaired compared to sober participants. Based on this, they suggested that rather than narrowing one’s focus of attention (which would presumably affect performance on the simultaneous lists), alcohol impairs strategy use and processes involved in encoding and retrieving sequences. Similarly, Kirchner and Sayette (2003) found that moderate intoxication in male social drinkers impaired controlled processing during a memory task for previously studied lists of words, while automatic processes were left unaffected. More recently, Sayette, Reichle, and Schooler (2009) found that moderate intoxication increased instances of mind wandering in a sample of male social drinkers (it is common for male samples to be examined in initial investigations of intoxication due to IRB complications of dealing with unknown pregnancies in females and differential dosage levels). In the Sayette et al. study, intoxicated participants were more likely to zone out (and not realize it) when they were supposed to be attending to a target cognitive task. This result suggests less attentional control and if anything a less focused attentional state due to intoxication. Finally, intoxication to .07 blood alcohol content (BAC) has been directly linked to decreases in WMC as measured by changes in pre-to-post intoxication performance on complex span tasks (Colflesh, Jarosz, & Wiley, 2010). These tasks require alternating between a processing task, such as judging the meaningfulness of sentences, and a memory task, such as remembering a list of letters. Performance on complex span tasks is thought to depend on attentional control and executive functioning (Engle, 2002). Taken together, these findings suggest that moderate alcohol intoxication may in fact lead to less attentional control or a more diffuse attentional state, which in turn could improve performance on creative problem solving tasks.

To test this hypothesis, the present study examined the effects of moderate alcohol intoxication (.07 BAC) on a creative problem solving task, the Remote Associates Test (RAT; originally developed by Mednick, 1962). The RAT is a commonly used creative problem solving task that has become popular due to its relatively short presentation time allowing for multiple trials during the course of a single session. For each item, participants are given three target words such as PEACH, ARM, and TAR, and are tasked with finding a fourth word, such as PIT, that forms a good two-word phrase with each of the target words. The RAT is thought to involve creative problem solving because the most salient potential responses to the problem are often incorrect, and one must retrieve more remote associates in order to reach solution (Bowden and Jung-Beeman, 2003b, Smith and Blankenship, 1991, Wiley, 1998). For those problems where initial associates are incorrect or the solver reaches an impasse, successful solution is thought to require divergent thinking and the ability to overcome fixation from earlier guesses (Zhong, Dijksterhuis, & Galinsky, 2008). If reduced executive control does in fact aid in creative problem solving, then participants in the intoxication condition should solve more RAT items than those in the sober control condition, or they may solve them more quickly.

Additionally, intoxication could change the perception of the “insightfulness” of RAT solutions. One common way to test for differences in the perception of solution methods is through feeling-of-insight ratings (Bowden, Jung-Beeman, Fleck, & Kounios, 2005), in which participants assess whether they felt the solution came suddenly to mind (an Aha! moment) or if they felt they reached solution through step-by-step, analytic processes. Reduced executive function may reduce participants’ reliance on analytical strategies, which could make them more likely to report the use of intuitive processes during solution in the intoxicated condition.

Section snippets

Participants

A target sample of 40 male social drinkers aged 21–30 was recruited by Craigslist and from the university community. Twenty participated in the alcohol intoxication condition and twenty in the sober comparison condition. Following standard procedures (Kirchner & Sayette, 2003), potential participants completed a telephone screening to establish that they met age, health and drinking pattern criteria for the intoxicated condition. Individuals were excluded from participating if they showed signs

RAT

The first analysis explored whether perceptions of the problem solving process differed between the conditions. On average, intoxicated individuals tended to rate their experience of problem solving as being more insightful (M = 3.98) than the sober participants (M = 3.35, t(38) = 1.78, p < .08). These ratings were examined in another way by analyzing the number of ratings placed on the lower part and upper part of the scale for correctly solved problems (with scores 1–3 meaning solved non-insightfully

Discussion

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. These changes were accompanied

Role of the funding source

This research was supported by a Psi Chi Graduate Research Grant to the first author. After agreeing to fund the proposed design, the funding source played no role in study design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation, nor in the writing of the report and the decision to submit the research for publication.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Daniel Aiello and Brittney Rayhorn for their assistance on this project, and a Psi Chi Graduate Research Grant to the first author.

References (41)

  • D. Cai et al.

    REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    (2009)
  • Colflesh, G.J.H., Jarosz, A. F., Wiley, J. (2010). The effects of alcohol on working memory and change detection. In...
  • A.R. Conway et al.

    Working memory span tasks: A methodological review and user’s guide

    Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

    (2005)
  • M.S. DeCaro et al.

    When and how less is more: Reply to Tharp & Pickering

    Cognition

    (2009)
  • R.W. Engle

    Working memory capacity as executive attention

    Current Directions in Psychological Science

    (2002)
  • R.A. Finke et al.

    Creative cognition: Theory, research and applications

    (1992)
  • R.A. Josephs et al.

    The two faces of alcohol myopia: Attentional mediation of psychological stress

    Journal of Abnormal Psychology

    (1990)
  • M.J. Kane et al.

    The role of prefrontal cortex in working-memory capacity, executive attention, and general fluid intelligence: An individual differences perspective

    Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

    (2002)
  • M.J. Kane et al.

    The generality of working memory capacity: A latent variable approach to verbal and visuospatial memory span and reasoning

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

    (2004)
  • Cited by (141)

    • Sweet ideas: How the sensory experience of sweetness impacts creativity

      2022, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
    • Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation

      2023, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text