Alcohol helps with great ideas ... but don't get drunk

A recent study in the Harvard Business Review posited that people are better at creative problem-solving under the guise of alcohol. Photo / Getty Images

It turns out that a long Rosé-induced work lunch might not be a bad thing after all.

Mike Hutcheson, author of Relax and Grow Rich, says your best ideas are when you are relaxed, and alcohol helps with this.

"When you look through the pantheon of great innovation and great creation it's always when people have been relaxed," Hutcheson said.

"An accelerator of thinking easy is just a bit of alcohol, up to a certain point."

This comes after a recent study in the Harvard Business Review posited that people are better at creative problem-solving under the guise of alcohol.

The research, conducted by professor Andrew Jarosz and colleagues out of Mississippi State University, tested two controlled groups' abilities to answer a series of word association problems from a creative problem-solving assessment called the Remote Associates Test.

One group was sober, the other had blood alcohol levels that neared legal intoxication (.075).

Sample questions included "What word relates to these three: 'duck,' 'dollar,' 'fold'?" The answer is "bill".

The group who imbibed gave more correct answers, and arrived at the solutions quicker than those who were sober.

"You often hear of great writers, artists, and composers who claim that alcohol enhanced their creativity, or people who say their ideas are better after a few drinks. We wanted to see if we could find evidence to back that up," Jarosz told Harvard Business Review.

"We found that the tipsy people solved two to three more problems than folks who stayed sober. They also submitted their answers more quickly within the one-minute-per-question time limit, which is maybe even more surprising.

"In an exercise like the RAT, it's important not to fixate on your first thought, and alcohol seems to help that seemingly irrelevant stuff slip in."

However, Hutcheson warns that alcohol doesn't advance insight, but may reduce inhibitions which could lead to the creation of great ideas.

"It's not because of alcohol, it's because at a certain point you're relaxed with comrades and your inhibitions about status and differences have disappeared and your speaking in vino veritas [Latin: In wine, truth; English: What soberness conceals, drunkenness reveals]," Hutcheson said.

"Inebriation is bad, a lack of inhibition is good and lack of inhibition enables good things to float to the surface when your able to express good ideas."

Hutcheson believes more bosses should be looking to take meetings away from boardrooms and into more relaxed settings, including bars.

"Rather than impose strictures on what we call corporate entertainment, we should actually subsidise it, because that's when the best ideas happen," he says.

The experiment involved 20 male subjects between the ages of 21 to 30. The group were served three vodka cranberry cocktails over a 30-minute period. The ratio of alcohol to juice was always 1:3, but heavier people got bigger drinks.

To eliminate intelligence imbalance, the participants were tested prior to being placed into their groups.