Study finds Drinking Alcohol May Significantly Enhance Problem Solving Skills

[collegestud2013]

---

Members don't see this ad.

http://medicaldaily.com/news/201204...ills-analytical-thinking-creativity-study.htm

Clearly everyone should do this before their MCAT, orgo exams, etc... if they want to get into medical school. So for those of you with less-than-stellar grades, this will likely solve you problems.

 

[lunt]

I'll add this.

http://xkcd.com/323/

Your article intuitively makes sense. But then again you'd need to have a good control of how much you drink/metabolize to time the alcohol level right.

 

[couldabeenadoc]

Might be a relevant study for the 2015 & beyond MCAT, but for now I'd say stick to coffee or tea on test day. 😛

"In the study, 20 social drinkers watched an animated movie while eating a snack. Volunteers then drank enough of a vodka cranberry drink to reach an average peak blood alcohol level of 0.075 percent, just below the current 0.08 percent cutoff for legal intoxication in the United States. Another 20 social drinkers watched the same movie without eating or drinking.
Men in both groups then completed a creative problem-solving task. For each of 15 items, volunteers saw three words — say, peach, arm and tar — and had to think of a fourth word that forms a phrase with each of them, such as pit.
On average, participants at peak intoxication solved about nine problems correctly, versus approximately six winners for the sober crowd. It took an average of 11.5 seconds for intoxicated men to generate a correct solution, compared with 15.2 seconds for sober men.
Both groups performed comparably on the test before the study began."

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338406/title/Vodka_delivers_shot_of_creativity

 

[jf1987]

I will feel less guilt tonight as I enjoy a beer or two. Thank you.

 

[DVolle]

I was recently enjoying a game of pong with friends while imbibing some fermented beverages and we came upon a snag, the ball had become severely dented. Not knowing, or caring, that alcohol improves problem solving skills, I instantly thought back to basic chemistry: an increase in temperature of a gas results in an increase of volume of the gas.

After a few seconds of holding the ball under running hot water, the dent was gone and we were back to our merriment, empirically proving that alcohol, does indeed, increase problem solving skills.

Huzzah science!

 

[western1]

In that case... I'll be back in about 4 hours to solve some problems.