A recent article featured on Wired.com and written by eminently entertaining contributer Jonah Lehrer (one half of WNYC’s excellent radio show and podcast series, Radio Lab), caught my eye. The article, entitled Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great For Creativity, examines why certain creative problems seem to be more easily solved by individuals that are sleepy or drunk and less able to edit their thought process the way we do when we’re “sharp”. It also explains why so many writers, musicians, and artists swear by the creative benefits of alcohol or sleep deprivation.

Cognitive flexibility, or the ability to think “outside the box”, so to speak, is one of the defining characteristics of creativity. It seems that a mental state in which we may feel less “sharp” are actually enabling us to exhibit some cognitive flexibility, making it more difficult for us to edit our thoughts and focus attention in a prescribed way.

One study in which this concept was explored recently took place at Albion College. Researcher surveyed 428 students’ sleep cycles (known as circadian cycles, or rhythms), asking whether they were more alert and productive in the morning or at night. Students answered overwhelmingly “at night”, preferring to steer away from 9 am classes. The researchers then gave the students a number of insight puzzles and then standard arithmetic problems. Here are a couple examples Lehrer provided a couple of insight puzzles included in the study:

A man has married twenty women in a small town. All of the women are still alive and none of them are divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man?

Marsha and Marjorie were born on the same day of the same month of the same year to the same mother and the same father, but they are not twins. How is this possible?

These kinds of problems ask the respondent to think abstractly about their answers, directing their thought process in a way that would follow a logical progression. In other words, not being able to pay attention and not being likely to double-think your choices, actually improves creative thought. The study showed that students looking over these types of questions prior to 8:30 AM (still groggy from sleep) and after 5:00 PM (tired form the day) performed better on insight puzzles than others in the middle of the day.

Another study at the University of Illinois tested students that had imbibed alcohol (to the level of .075% blood alcohol level), and then submitted the students to word problems. The students that had been drinking scored significantly higher on creative word puzzles than students that had imbibed northing.

What does all of this mean for creative people? Work when you wake, drink before noon, and stay up late. As Lehrer so articulately explains, “The stupor of alcohol, like the haze of the early morning, makes it harder for us to ignore those unlikely thoughts and remote associations that are such important elements of the imagination.”

(SPOILER: the answers to the problems above were “priest” and “triplets”, respectively.)