Tired or drunk? You might be feeling quite creative

Imagine: it’s 9am and you enter the lecture theatre that will be your home for the next year. Maybe you went out to Ministry or you had a few too many pints in Metric. Perhaps you just stayed up late getting to know new people in halls or from your course. Either way you’re knackered. Maybe you’re even still drunk! If you’re suffering from a vague feeling of guilt because this isn’t the work ethic you should be starting with for your new degree at Imperial, then fear not. Being tired or drunk doesn’t have to keep you from getting your work done. Here’s why.

Creativity

Conventionally, creativity is linked with great literature, art and music. Many historic artists and musicians were known to drink We’re all scientists here at Imperial, so when research suggests that being tired or drunk can improve creative thinking you might think, “So what?” But science depends on creative thinking for its advancement. Creativity is coming up with novel ideas, and that’s how you solve problems. Contrary to what your intuition might suggest, research published in Thinking and Reasoning in 2011 indicated that people are actually at their most creative during what the authors termed their ‘non-optimal’ time of day. In other words, if you’re a night owl – which many of us are – then it is during the morning that you’re best able to solve insight-based problems, due to your grogginess. Similarly those who consider themselves early birds answer such questions more effectively in the evening. The research was carried out by asking 428 undergrads whether they thought of themselves as morning or evening people, and then asking them to solve six questions, three of which were insight puzzles and three of which were focused analytical problems. Furthermore, the students were tested at different times – one group between 8:30am and 9:30am, the other between 4pm and 5:30pm. The students’ performance on analytical tasks like long division was unaffected by time of day, but if they were an early bird or a night owl then they were more successful at solving the creative puzzles at their least optimum time. Furthermore, students with no preference for the morning or the evening didn’t show any difference in success at solving the insight problems between each time of day. Why? Well, it’s your inability to concentrate and your wandering thoughts that allow you to work out creative insight puzzles. Here’s an example: A man has married 20 women in a small town. All of the women are still alive and none of them are divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man? The answer is a priest. Did you get it? Sleepy students, whose brains aren’t entirely focused on the problem, consider many more associations between ideas than alert students and are more likely to answer this puzzle correctly. Even being bored can have this effect. This is actually very similar to what happens if you’re mildly intoxicated and presented with an insight puzzle. In 2012 Andrew Jarosz and a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago tested the link between alcohol intoxication and creativity. Their inebriated subjects performed worse than sober subjects on working memory tests (like driving a car), but solved the insight puzzles presented to them both more often and in less time than their sober counterparts. Now, this isn’t encouragement for you to get absolutely wasted every single night or to always stay up really late. Getting those creative juices flowing via tiredness won’t help you to copy down notes or grind through a problem sheet, although a caffeine boost probably will, as it deceives your brain into thinking you have more energy than you really do. But what tiredness and intoxication will help you produce is a good idea for the projects, presentations, designs or essays you’ll have to do over the year. So you might want to take into account whether you’re an early bird or a night owl when you’ve got creative work to do. And you might as well try to make going out and having that drink work for you in more ways than one.