Sleepy + drunk = maximum creativity according to science
Oh man, as if I needed another excuse to burn the candle at both ends and trip the light fantastic: apparently my not-so-mild addiction to sleep deprivation (there's just too much fun stuff to do in life, okay?) is making me more creative.
The editorial powers that be at Wired have uncovered a slew of studies indicating that people with damage to their prefrontal lobes — the parts of the brain that regulate attention and focus — are significantly more adept at creative problem solving, in some cases nearly doubly so, than their non-brain-damaged peers.
Why? Well, it turns out freeing the brain from its "mental spotlight," and allowing it to wander beyond the perceived margins of a given problem — the type we've come to expect from training in maths and sciences — allows for more generous information gathering, which in turn leads to more wide-ranging possible solutions. That is to say the "irrelevant" information the brain would normally discount gets factored into the equation when attention and focus are compromised, leading to a more creative interpretation of the problem and hence more creative problem-solving.
Now, as the article handily states "Of course, this doesn’t mean you should take a hammer to your frontal lobes," (thanks for pointing that out, Wired) but the non-brain-damaged among us can, and I'm guessing some frequently do, impair our own prefrontal lobes when we're groggy or, yeah, drunk.
Which makes me feel a whole lot better about my habit of starting articles on, say, a Sunday evening after being out dancing to the wee hours the night before...Ahem...
That's one for the insomniacs.
