So my homebrews may make me smarter. Sorry women, you'll have to research on your own.
The CBSnews version:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57413201-10391704/can-alcohol-make-men-smarter-study-suggests-yes/
The Foxnews article:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/1559234770001/does-drinking-beer-make-you-smarter
The original article:
http://www.fabbs.org/index.php?cID=462
People have long suspected that creativity can be summoned with a
glass of wine or a pint of beer, but science is just now confirming that
suspicion. Cognitive psychologist Jennifer Wiley says alcohol enhances
creative problem solving by reducing our ability to focus our attention
on something. In other words, it diminishes what scientists refer to as
our working memory capacity, or WMC.
“Working memory capacity is considered the ability to control one’s
attention,” says Wiley, a professor at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. “It’s the ability to remember one thing while you’re thinking
about something else.” In the past, scientists have found that increased
working memory capacity, or better attentional control usually leads to
better problem-solving performance—when it comes to analytical problem
solving. But the same cannot be said when it comes to solving problems
that require creativity.
With that in mind, Wiley and her colleagues tested the effects of
alcohol consumption on creative problem solving tasks. Most states
consider a person intoxicated if his blood alcohol level is 0.08 or
higher. “We found at 0.07 blood alcohol, people were worse at working
memory tasks, but they were better at creative problem-solving tasks,”
says Wiley.
That’s because the alcohol helped study participants access remote
ideas, ideas that develop through association not linear analysis. In
fact, linear reasoning can keep people focused on ideas they think are
important but really aren’t.
For example, if Wiley asked you to tell her what word goes with the
following: blue, cottage, Swiss. And you said, “cheese,” you’d be
accessing your remote ideas, not linear ones. That is, you associated
blue, cottage, and Swiss with cheese, a commendable and constructive
thing to do.
“We have this assumption, that being able to focus on one part of a
problem or having a lot of expertise is better for problem solving,”
says Wiley. “But that’s not necessarily true. Innovation may happen when
people are not so focused. Sometimes it’s good to be distracted.”
In other words, it can pay to loosen up and dial down our attentional
control, our capacity to choose what one pays attention to and what one
chooses to ignore.
But can one loosen up and dial down without a glass of wine or a pint of beer?
That’s what these results suggest, says Wiley.
In other research on creative problem solving in groups, theories
suggest that groups whose members possess diverse skill levels; that is,
varying levels of mastery or expertise, may be more likely to come up
with “great things,” says Wiley. To test this idea, she and her
colleagues asked students with varied levels of mathematical skills to
work together to come up with a formula.
“A lot of things happened,” says Wiley. “The low-skilled students
learned more, they asked more questions,” she says. “And they made the
high-skilled students think more deeply. So, the group did end up
inventing their own formula.”
Wiley also noticed that groups of three were more effective than groups of two at coming up with creative solutions.
“In groups of two, we tend to be more polite, not to confront or ask
questions,” Wiley says. “But when you respond to a question in a group
of three, you’re not confronting, you’re speaking up for the whole
group. So, it turns out that makes for a little more conflict, and good
information comes out. In groups of two, people are looking for
commonalities. Agreeing may get you through tasks quickly, but it
doesn’t help solve problems in the long run.”
But here’s something else that can help your creativity: changing
your routine—especially if you work on something that you usually don’t
work on during your non-optimal time of day, a time when you tend to be
drowsy. For example, if you normally write your novella between 8 and 10
each night, try writing between 5 and 7 one morning, and see what
happens. Or if you like to brainstorm a little before lunchtime, see
what happens when you try brainstorming during your morning shower
instead.
“Sometimes the really creative stuff comes out when you’re having a
glass of wine over dinner, or when you’re taking a shower” says Wiley.
Sleep, too, can be a gateway to problem solving. Tales abound about
artists and artists coming up with some of their best ideas while
inspecting the inside of their eyelids—or shortly thereafter—in the case
of people being given a problem to solve. Those who were allowed to
sleep after being exposed to a problem were more likely to come up with a
creative solution than those who weren’t.
There is also research suggesting that that aging fosters creative
problem solving, says Wiley. That’s because older adults tend to be more
easily distracted by seemingly extraneous information than younger
adults. But it’s this very tendency to be distracted that allows older
adults to take advantage of valuable information contained in what may
only appear to be unrelated data.
So, aging turns out to be a good thing when you’re trying to come up
with creative solutions to problems, says Wiley. “But no matter what
your age, sometimes you have to pay attention to the sparkly,
distracting things in order to solve a problem.”
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What this blog is for:
My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.
Friday, April 13, 2012
Can alcohol make men smarter? Study suggests yes
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