Inspiration in a Bottle
The Link Between Alcohol and Creativity is Alive and Well
People love it when science debunks everyday beliefs. One familiar trope in cultures around the world and throughout history that has recently been thrown into question is that of alcohol as muse.
The belief in a connection between alcohol and creativity is ancient and ubiquitous. In ancient China, for instance, it is not uncommon for poets to create entire series of poems under the rubric, “Written While Drunk,” including this one from the Zhang Yue (667-730):
Once drunk, my delight knows no limits — / Even better than before I’m drunk. / My movements, my expressions, all turn into dance,/ And every word out of my mouth turns into a poem!
This recalls an ancient Greek saying:
If with water you fill up your glasses / You’ll never write anything wise/ But wine is the horse of Parnassus/ That carries a bard to the skies.
The name of Kvasir, the Anglo-Saxon god of the bards and artistic inspiration, was derived from the word for “strong ale.” And despite a nominal religious commitment to prohibition, the greatest Persian poetry was produced by, and openly celebrated, the revelatory power of wine.
This association between alcohol and creativity has endured to the present day. An inordinate proportion of writers, poets, artists, and musicians are also heavy users of liquid inspiration, willing to put up with the physical and sometimes financial and personal costs in return for an unleashed mind. “It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it?…It pickles my kidneys,” declares the fictional, and alcoholic, writer in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, “Yes. What does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar.”
It is thus with at least a modicum of spoilsport glee that the results of a recent meta-study of creativity interventions—one that purports to find no correlation between drug use and creativity enhancement—have been reported in the popular press. A piece in The Guardian, “Drugs and Alcohol Do Not Make You More Creative—Research Finds,” discusses a paper published in March 2023 that reviewed 84 studies documenting the effects of various training strategies or manipulations on creative insight. The headline takeaway from this meta-study (a scientific review of a collection of specific studies) is that drugs have no effect on creativity—unlike other, more wholesome interventions such as travel, exposure to other cultures, meditation and creativity-enhancing training programs. One of the authors, Dr. Paul Hanel, is quoted as saying in an interview about the article, “What we hear about in the media is people who successfully enhance their creativity using drugs, but you don’t hear about the examples where someone took drugs and passed out and therefore their creativity was lower.” Another author, Dr. Jennifer Haase, adds, “Ideas generated under the influence often seem disjointed or ill-suited as solutions later on. Given the numerous side-effects associated with drug use, it is scientifically unsound to recommend their consumption in pursuit of enhanced creative output.” Apparently bad news for Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway, and a great comfort to temperance advocates everywhere.
Beat poets and heavy-drinking novelists can take solace, however, in the fact that, upon examination, the results of this study have absolutely nothing negative to say about the role of intoxicants in creativity. Of the 84 studies included in the analysis, only five used manipulations that were classified by the authors as employing “drugs.” Of these five, four had subjects take Adderall (the trade name for a form of amphetamine often used to treat ADHD) or a similar stimulant, and only one involved an actual intoxicant (alcohol). The key finding generating all the excitement was that, as the authors put it, “drug use was least effective…[of the manipulations] and did not significantly enhance creativity. Simultaneously, the heterogeneity in effect sizes of studies that used drugs to enhance creativity was lowest…suggesting that the effect is similar across different drug types.”
This is a wildly misleading statement. The creativity effect is indeed similar across the four studies that employed the same drug, slightly different forms of amphetamine: very low or even negative. However, the only study that actually did use a different drug type, alcohol, found a moderate to strong positive correlation, quite different from the other four studies. So the study did not, in fact, find that “drugs” had no effect on creativity, but rather that speed had no effect.
This decision to lump alcohol in with Adderall and other stimulants was a serious mistake, in light of how different these drugs are, and especially considering that — as the authors themselves note in their introduction — one of the dominant theories about creativity is that it results from a relaxed mind. Alcohol relaxes; speed not so much. Anyone familiar with the literature on psychoactives and creativity would predict that they would have very different effects as creativity manipulations. Having a category of manipulation, “Drugs,” that lumps together such different chemicals is about as helpful, and theoretically defensible, as having a category, “Things You Put in Your Mouth.” One would expect that the effect on creativity of putting something in your mouth would very much depend on what that specific thing might be — your finger, a piece of candy, some crystal meth, a glass of Merlot, a carrot. “Drugs” are a similarly diverse set of substances.
Stimulants like speed, coffee and nicotine focus one’s attention and enhance the activity of a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC, while key for remaining on task and delaying gratification, appears to be the deadly enemy of creativity. It allows us to remain laser-focused on task but blinds us to remote possibilities. Both creativity and learning new associations require a relaxation of cognitive control that allows the mind to wander. An fMRI study of jazz pianists showed that the transition from playing scales or a completely written-out tune to freely improvising was reflected by a downregulation of the PFC. Other correlational evidence points in the same direction. For instance, adults with permanently damaged PFCs perform better on lateral thinking tasks than healthy controls. And, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, at least one study provides some direct, causal evidence for the negative role of the PFC when it comes to lateral thinking. Experimenters had subjects perform a creativity task, measured their performance, and then temporarily knocked their PFC offline by zapping it with a powerful transcranial magnet. (Don’t try this at home.) The subjects did better post-zapping. Similarly helpful is an overall passive or relaxed state of mind, indicated by a high level of alpha-wave activity in the brain, which reflects a downregulation of goal-oriented and top-down control regions like the PFC. So it is not surprising that experiments using stimulants as creativity enhancers didn’t fare very well.
Alcohol, an intoxicant, has such a variety of effects that it has been called a “pharmacological hand-grenade.” One of its main impacts on the body-brain system, though, is to depress the function of the PFC. This can have negative consequences: disinhibition of unsavory character traits, for instance, or increased impulsivity. However, given the relationship between decreased cognitive control and thinking outside the box, we should expect that, in small to moderate doses, intoxicants like alcohol should increase individual creativity.
And that is, indeed, what we find. The only paper in the meta-study described above that did involve intoxicants rather than stimulants, entitled “Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving,” was published in 2012 by Andrew Jarosz and colleagues. Subjects were brought into the lab, weighed, given some bagels to buffer their stomachs, and then asked to complete a working memory capacity task, a commonly used measure of executive function. This provided a pre-intoxication benchmark of their cognitive control abilities. Then came the alcohol: a series of vodka and cranberry cocktails over a ten-minute period, during which subjects were distracted by watching the animated film Ratatouille (!). The alcohol dosage was calibrated to their weight in order to eventually bring them to between 0.07 and 0.08% blood alcohol content (BAC). This is pretty well lubricated but not completely drunk, the point at which most jurisdictions make it illegal to drive. While their buzz was coming on, they completed a series of distraction tasks. Once intoxication was expected to peak, subjects were given a second cognitive control task, had their BAC measured, and were given a series of creativity tasks to complete. They also had to report on whether they figured out the solution to these tasks through careful, step-wise reasoning or simply in a flash of insight. A sober control group skipped the bagels and drinks, but still got the animated rat movie and performed the same tasks.
Since both drunk and sober participants completed a working memory task before the drinking began, drunk subjects could be compared to sober counterparts with similar levels of executive function. As expected, once the drinking group got drunk, they underperformed the controls on the second executive function task — the alcohol did its job of taking the PFC temporarily offline. The drunks, however, smoked the sober controls on the creativity tasks, solving more of them and doing so more quickly. They were also more likely to report having solved the tests in moments of inspiration, with the answers just popping into their heads.
This is only one study, with a fairly small number of participants. Coupled with a much larger body of work linking decreased cognitive control to enhanced lateral thinking, though, it bolsters the ancient, cross-cultural consensus on alcohol and creativity. Ignore whatever recent headlines you might have seen: the ancients were right about the power of our liquid muse.
Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Portions of this essay were adapted from Drunk, which should be consulted for full references and more on this topic.
