"Drinking Alcohol May Significantly Enhance Problem Solving Skills"

post by duckduckMOO · 2012-04-12T17:24:52.156Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 11 comments

saw this on reddit. Thought people here would be interested.

 

http://medicaldaily.com/news/20120411/9496/alcohol-solving-skills-analytical-thinking-creativity-study.htm

 

edit: from a comment in the reddit thread

 http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/s50la/drinking_alcohol_may_significantly_enhance/

 

 

"The article is here for those who are interested. Going through the article, the measure they chose was the Remote Associates Test. In this test you are given 3 words like ARM, TAR, and PEACH and supposed to guess the associated word. (PIT in this case) (more here if you want to give it a shot). The three words flash on the screen and you are given 1 minute. When you 'know' the answer you press a key and write in your answer. The time to press the key and whether the answer was right are recorded. Afterward you are told to say how you came to the answer on a scale of 1-7 (1 being strategy 7 being a flash of insight). Drunk (.7 .07 (thanks Erobre) BAC) people answered slightly faster and came to 20% more solutions. (they also said their answers were based more on insight than strategy)"

 

The "here" links to http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810012000037

11 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by maia · 2012-04-12T18:22:58.490Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It sounds like alcohol improved their automated, instantaneous processing - or in other words, System 1 thinking. Based on what I know about alcohol, I'd guess it still slows down your System 2 thinking considerably. In fact, that could even be an explanation for the improvement in System 1 speed: their fact-checker is disabled, so they answer with their intuition right away.

comment by JGWeissman · 2012-04-12T18:19:21.998Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There is quite a gap between improving associated word recall and "enhancing problem solving skills".

comment by A1987dM (army1987) · 2012-04-12T17:53:54.058Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Seeing “ARM, TAR, and PEACH” written with capitals somewhat slowed me down because my brain went in acronym recognition mode.

(FWIW, I'm sober right now.)

comment by buybuydandavis · 2012-04-13T09:32:33.973Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not surprised. Lots of notable writers were deep in the sauce.

Turning off the critic for a while seems like a good thing. I think that's one of my sources of akrasis - the Critic is mightier than the Creator. Gotta shut that Critic up to get anything done, or the Critic sees what's wrong before the Creator can get anyting down on paper.

comment by thomblake · 2012-04-13T00:47:02.971Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That is a really weird exercise. I had to read several descriptions of the test to even figure out what people were supposed to do, and informally testing myself I had trouble getting any of the solutions.

comment by FiftyTwo · 2012-04-13T01:20:19.781Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm too drunk to comment.

Replies from: Jayson_Virissimo
↑ comment by Jayson_Virissimo · 2012-04-13T09:42:31.897Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm too drunk to comment.

Apparently not.

Replies from: MartinB
↑ comment by MartinB · 2012-04-13T18:56:16.803Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes if you substitute it with 'comment something reasonable'. This just being a placeholder pointing it out.

comment by StepVheN · 2012-04-13T18:23:02.426Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I had some friends in college who would drink heavily before attacking programming problems.

I tried the same on a music piece I was working on one night, worked a charm. It felt very wrong morally speaking, probably due to my own prejudices, but I got the thing done and done well.

comment by tut · 2012-04-19T17:24:39.790Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It is good for the kind of problem solving where concentrating is detrimental.

comment by RHollerith (rhollerith_dot_com) · 2012-04-16T02:59:41.324Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Upvoted for the excellent summary of the study.