All work and no play? Open up your creativity with wine sipping | Victory Wine

Do you ever feel like you are a little more creative when you are sipping some wine? You find that a glass of wine sipped over hours helped you bring out your creative hat for an essay, some new branding logo you had been stewing on, or how you wanted to mix kale, spinach and certain fromage with gnocchi?

Well, a relatively recent study found scientific evidence for that position.

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI STUDY

A 2007 study by the University of Missouri found that alcohol could impede the brain’s executive processes. Yes, that left brain. The accountant in you. The logical thinker. All linear. No spatial. But is a zero-sum game. A little ying to your creative yang. With one part not firing the same way, we open up the other. Always an opportunity.

Another STUDY

In a recent study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, psychologist Jennifer Wiley and her research group at the University of Illinois at Chicago set out to find an answer to this question.

They recruited people (ages 21-30) who drank socially, via Craigslist, to come into their lab and, well, they got some of them drunk. Some people were served a vodka cranberry drink until their blood alcohol level was approximately .075 and others were kept sober. The researchers then had everyone complete a creative problem solving task similar to the baseball example I gave above. People were given a series of three target words such as "peach", "arm", and "tar," and were tasked with finding a fourth word, such as "pit," that forms a good two-word phrase with each of the target words. This puzzle is thought to involve creative problem solving because the most obvious potential response to the problem is often incorrect, and people must look for more remote words in order to reach a solution.

EPIPHANY MOMENTS

What Wiley and her colleagues found was that intoxicated individuals solved more creative word problems, and in less time, than their sober counterparts. Interestingly, people who drank also felt that their performance was more likely to come as a sudden insight, the answer came all at once, in an “Aha!” moment of illumination

LESS FOCUSED IS A GOOD THING?

The “less focused” mind thinks broadly so you will pull those thoughts out of air.

Perhaps, this is where these phrases came from:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,
All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.

Hmm….we will need a glass of one of these wines to ponder…