Read Online The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by Eric Weiner - Free Book Online

intellectual puzzle games to music, dancing girls, and similar titillations,” notes historian Robert Flacelière. No symposium, though, was complete without wine, and lots of it. The Greeks had some funny ideas about alcohol, as they did about so many things. Aristotle believed that consuming too much wine made you fall on your face, while too much beer landed you on your back, and for reasons not immediately clear, the Greeks always diluted their wine—five parts water to two parts wine, mixed in a large bowl called a krater.
    Which brings us to one possible explanation for Athenian genius: the booze. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Alcohol and creativity have long been linked in the public imagination, and in the imagination of inebriated writers and artists down through the ages. William Faulkner said he wasn’t able to face the blank page without a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Many painters, from van Gogh to Jackson Pollock, liked a swig or four while working. Winston Churchill claims he could not have written The World Crisis , his five-volume memoir, without his muse, booze. Indeed, some call this alcohol-fueled productivity the “Churchill gene.” There is no evidence such a gene actually exists, but researchers have identified a genetic variation, called the G-variant, which causes alcohol to act more like an opioid drug, such as morphine, in some people. Theoretically (and it is only a theory), this genetic peculiarity lubricates the wheels of creativethinking in some individuals but not others. Or, as Mark Twain put it, “My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”
    You’d think there would be boatloads of research investigating the connection between alcohol and creative genius, given the enormous interest in the subject, not to mention the plethora of willing volunteers, yet I am able to find surprisingly few empirical studies. Nevertheless, a few brave researchers have bellied up to the laboratory.
    To understand the significance of the research, we need to step back and examine the four stages of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Alcohol affects each of these stages differently. One study, by Swedish psychologist Torsten Norlander, found that alcohol consumption facilitates the incubation stage—that is, when you’re not actively trying to solve a problem but, instead, allow it to marinate, letting your unconscious have a crack at it—but impairs the verification stage. In other words, you may come up with brilliant ideas but you won’t be able to recognize them.
    In another study, psychologists at the University of Illinois served twenty volunteers a moderate amount of alcohol, vodka and cranberry juice. They cut off the volunteers when their blood-alcohol levels reached 0.075 percent, or just below the legal limit for driving. These moderately sloshed volunteers, along with a control group of twenty sober participants, were then given a test that measures divergent thinking—again, an important aspect of creativity.
    The results, published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition , are enough to make you reach for a drink. The sober men took, on average, 15.4 seconds to come up with a creative response, but the vodka drinkers needed only 11.5 seconds. Later the researchers asked the volunteers (presumably after they sobered up) how they approached the task. The inebriated group tended to describe their approach as “intuitive,” while the sober group used words like “analytical.” The study provides the first empirical evidence of something we have long suspected: alcohol decreases inhibition and, for some at least, opens creative channels otherwise shuttered.
    Two key questions, though, remain unanswered: Which people and how much alcohol? What the researchers didn’t do was conduct the same experiment but this time with double, or triple, the amount of alcohol consumed. I’m willing to bet they would get different results,