WASHINGTON – It is said that people become better looking after a few drinks. And according to a new study, some may also get smarter.
Psychologists at the University of Illinois found when men drank two pints of beer, they tackled brain teasers with relative ease over sober problem solvers, reports The Telegraph.
Not only did the 40 test drinkers get more answers right, they were quicker to deliver them, researchers said. In the test, the group of young men was given three words such as coin, quick and spoon and had to come up with the fourth word that linked the three. In this case, the word is silver.
The drinking test group solved nearly 40 percent more problems than the non-drinkers and took an average of 12 seconds to solve the problem, versus the non-drinkers 15.5 second average.
Alcohol allows for creative thinking that otherwise may be stifled, so test subjects came up with more imaginative solutions, concluded the study’s author Jennifer Wiley.
“We tested what happens when people are slightly merry, not when people drink to extreme,” Wiley said.
“The bottom line is that we think being too focused can blind you to novel possibilities, and a broader, more flexible state of attention is needed for creative solutions to emerge.”
The study is published in the journal of Consciousness and Cognition.
WTOP’s Megan Cloherty contributed to this report.
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