Drinking Alcohol May Significantly Enhance Problem Solving SkillsScientists found that men who either drank two pints of beer or two glasses of wine before solving brain teasers not only got more questions right, they also were quicker in delivering correct answers, compared to men who answered the questions sober.
While the latest findings go against the traditional beliefs that alcohol impairs analytical thinking and rational thoughts, lead author Professor Jennifer Wiley of the University of Illinois at Chicago discovered that alcohol may enhance creativity problem solving by reducing the mind's working memory capacity, which is the ability to concentrate on something in particular.
"Working memory capacity is considered the ability to control one's attention," Wiley told the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. "It's the ability to remember one thing while you're thinking about something else."
Wiley said that the key finding was that being too focused can blind a person to novel possibilities and a broader, more flexible state of attention may be helpful for creative solutions to emerge.
The same logic may partly explain why those arty people from school / college who seemed a bit dim could actually be fairly good at what they do.
I see Youtube embedding has fallen off the trolley again. The flash object for your video is showing up at the top-left of the viewport, but the shiny green border is showing up at the correct place. I can only chalk this up to Youtube changing their embed markup again…
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Yeah, I can't explain this. I don't see any smoking guns in the element inspector either.
See also: we were very, very drunk: alcoholic bohemia and memories of the BBC.
Well it certainly worked for me playing co-op Portal 2 last night. Although playing that game when actually drunk is a bad idea, unless you like motion sickness.
Hey y'all, hold my beer and watch this!
Basically my experience with actual anxiety medication that twiddles the same GABA-related pathways. When all your attention is looping on AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIGH, actual problem-solving ability goes downhill along with the more obvious problems as regards getting near the problem, etc. [In other words, keeping working memory at its absolute maximum is useless if every slot is occupied by recalling reasons to panic.]
"Loosening up" is definitely a Thing. Unfortunately, as with booze, both overshooting and acquiring tolerance can become problems.
Two beers is my preferred level of endrunkening for playing pool (or similar games). It generally doesn't help with computer games though.
I actually ran into this the other night trying to untangle a giant mess involving failed branching with git and manually copying changes between different places. A beer and a couple shots later and I was able to actually just wade in and get things "fixed." I also find the alcohol helps me dismiss the elegant solutions when a pragmatic solution is just as effective and far quicker.
"Never root sober", I always say. I type a little slower, but it keeps the blinding rage at bay. Pro tip: if you can't type the root password on the first try, you may have overshot.
As a sysadmin, "never root sober" might not be a very good policy for me as far as my liver is concerned.
Fix a server, take a shot
(and wouldn't you know it, "Alcohol" by Barenaked Ladies just came on)
Well that almost makes it sound like payment on completion (and pretty crappy pay at that). I'd be inclined to ask for 4 times that much and half up-front. :)
(And coincidentally, you get three guesses why I'm up at 5AM ...)