Sometimes, it helps to consider irrelevant information.

Be sleepy. Be drunk. Be creative?

So, in looking around at other pieces by Jonah Lehrer on creativity, I came across this, from his blog. It’s regarding a couple studies that suggest not being able to properly focus and pay attention can improve one’s ability to solve creative problems. Being sleepy or drunk, in this scenario, is a good thing.

“Yikes” is the proper response. But it does directly link to the way a lot of artists and writers, etc, have used drugs as a creative crutch. Still, I refuse to lose sleep over it or pick up drinking.

In the first study, he poses a couple brain teaser questions. The first is one that 92 percent of people are able to quickly answer. As well, nearly 90 percent of those with brain damage to the prefrontal lobes—leaving them with “severe attentional deficits, unable to control their mental spotlight—are also able to find the answer.”

The second problem he shows is a similar arithmetic brain teaser, but one that requires a bit of insight or creative thinking rather than more derivative thinking. In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects are able to solve it, but 82 percent of those who “couldn’t pay attention” were able to.

Here are the two problems (you must move a single line to make them valid math statements):

IV = III + III (Easy)

III = III + III (Difficult)

I’ll give it over to him to mull the issue:

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/why-being-sleepy-and-drunk-are-great-for-creativity/#more-95756

What accounts for this bizarre result? Why does brain damage dramatically improve performance on a hard creative task? The explanation is rooted in the unexpected nature of the solution. . . . The reason this puzzle is so difficult, at least for people without brain damage, has to do with the standard constraints of math problems. Because we’re not used to thinking about the operator, most people quickly fix their attention on the roman numerals. But that’s a dead end. The patients with a severe cognitive deficit, in contrast, can’t restrict their search. They are forced by their brain injury to consider a much wider range of possible answers. And this is why they’re nearly twice as likely to have a breakthrough.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should take a hammer to your frontal lobes. Being able to direct the spotlight of attention is a crucial talent. However, the creative upside of brain damage — the unexpected benefits of not being able to focus — does reveal something important about the imagination. Sometimes, it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain. We are more likely to find the answer because we have less control over where we look.

This helps explain a new study led by Mareike Wieth at Albion College. The scientists surveyed 428 undergrads about their circadian habits, asking them whether they were more productive and alert in the morning or evening. As expected, the overwhelming majority were night owls, which is why they studiously avoided 9 a.m. classes. Then, the scientists gave the students a series of problem-solving tasks. Half of these tasks were creative insight puzzles, in which the answer arrives suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere.

[ . . . ]

The other half of the problems given to the students were standard analytic problems, such as long-division and pre-algebra equations. These questions don’t require insights. Instead, they benefit from ordinary focus, as people grind out the answer and check to make sure it’s right. The subjects were given four minutes to solve each problem. Half of them were tested early in the morning (8:30 a.m.) and half were tested in the late afternoon (around 5 p.m.).

The results are a testament to the creative virtues of grogginess. When people were tested during their “least optimal time of day” — think of that night owl stumbling into the lab in the early morning — they were significantly more effective at solving insight puzzles. (On one problem, their performance increased by nearly 50 percent.) Performance on the analytic problems, meanwhile, was unaffected by the clock.

The larger lesson is that those sleepy students, like a brain-damaged patient, benefit from the inability to focus. Their minds are drowsy and disorganized, humming with associations that they’d normally ignore. When we need an insight, of course, those stray associations are the source of the answer.

One last piece of evidence: A brand-new study by scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared performance on insight puzzles between sober and drunk students. (They were aiming for real intoxication, giving students enough booze to achieve a blood alcohol level of 0.075.) Once the students achieved “peak intoxication” the scientists gave them a battery of word problems – they’re known as remote associate tests – that are often solved in a moment of insight.

[ . . . ]

According to the data, drunk students solved more of these word problems in less time. They also were much more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. And the differences were dramatic: The alcohol made subjects nearly 30 percent more likely to find the unexpected solution.

Once again, the explanation for this effect returns us to the benefits of not being able to pay attention. 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.

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And an interesting conversation regarding creativity, then, is how to foster this non-attention attention. Because I like a good night sleep, you see. And I have some sort of problem with alcohol where I instantly get a headache. And drugs just scare me.

A short-term good idea, a long-term disaster.