Down a beer to get your creative juices flowing, says study

lager – just 0.5 per cent abv – had a different effect.

No participant had consumed any alcohol for at least 24 hours beforehand and all completed a set of psychological tests both before and after having a drink.

These were either for “executive control” – watching letters appear on a screen and pressing buttons when they saw ones that matched – and “creativity”, where they had to come up with a connection for a random series of words.

In the creativity tests, all those taking part before alcohol scored just over four out of 10. After drinking however, the placebo group moved up to a ranking of five out of 10 but the stronger alcohol drinkers improved to six out of 10.

In the executive control experiment however, those who drank the stronger beer were less able to complete the task successfully.

Even those drinking the weaker beer did worse afterwards than before.

Lead researcher Mathias Benedek at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Graz, Austria, where the study was carried out, explained: “Consumption of a low dose of alcohol tended to impair executive control but facilitated creative problem solving.

“We found that intoxicated participants actually improved their performance in the creativity tests beyond the level of the placebo group.

“This is consistent with the observation that creative problem solving tasks are often solved by spontaneous insight and accompanied by ‘aha!’ experiences.”

The ‘aha’ or Eureka experiences mentioned by researchers can be a result of alcohol reducing attention span thus allowing the brain space to come up with more “flexible” thoughts, the study, published in the journal Consciousness And Cognition, said.

But Dr Benedek warned: “Beneficial effects are likely restricted to very modest amounts of alcohol whereas excessive alcohol consumption typically impairs creative productivity.”

Beer is one of the oldest forms of alcoholic drink known to man.