Humble cuppa boosts the brain’s creativi-tea
DRINKING tea gives us an instant burst of brainpower and creativity, a study claims.
People who downed a humble cuppa and then undertook tests did better than those who drank just plain water, researchers found.
Overall, the tea drinkers scored higher in both creative and cognition tasks – and the effects showed up within minutes.
Although tea contains caffeine and theanine, which are both associated with increased attentiveness and alertness, these do not usually have an immediate effect.
Scientists running the tests believe a cup of tea enhances our mood, which in turn sparks the brain’s cognitive areas into life.
A group of 50 students took part in the study, with half given black tea and the rest a glass of water before performing two tests.
In the first they were asked to make an “attractive and creative” design out of building blocks.
In the second they were asked to think up a “cool” name for a new restaurant. Their efforts were judged by another group of students.
In the block test, the tea drinkers scored 6.54 points against 6.03 points for the water group.
In the name test, the tea students scored 4.11 against 3.78.
The researchers claim the results show that tea helps divergent thinking – the process of coming up with a number of new ideas around a central theme and what most people would define as creativity.
Yan Huang, who led the team at Peking University’s School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences in Chinese capital Beijing, said the good feelings created by a cuppa were more of an influence on the students’ performance than the chemicals contained in the brew. He said: “This work contributes to understanding the function of tea on creativity and offers a new way to investigate the relationship between food and beverage consumption and the improvement of human cognition.
“Two biological ingredients, caffeine and theanine, have beneficial effects on attention. But the amount of tea ingredients our participants absorbed was relatively small.”
The results of the tests were published in specialist journal Food Quality And Preference.