Since the Hungarian/American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi uncovered the concept of flow in the 1970’s, we’ve come to appreciate that state in which, with practice, we are capable of performing tasks effortlessly and unselfconsciously yet with a high degree of competence. Once they have acquired a skill, athletes, musicians, and other performers are able to achieve such states of flow due to a short term suspension of active self-monitoring. They have learned the task so well that they don’t have to consciously think about in order to perform it.
But there is a short cut to a crude version of “flow” in which active self-monitoring takes a back seat to finding an effortless connection to the cosmos—a glass or two of wine.
Of course, no glass of wine will give you the skills of a performer (although the skills of a wine taster are a kind of performance.) But mild inebriation gives us the flow without the practice which sounds like a good deal.
Not to mention the fact that mild inebriation seems to enhance certain kinds of creativity.
Divergent creativity is the ability to imagine multiple solutions to a problem, or novel uses for an object. In psychological tests, children tend to be better at this than adults because the region of the brain devoted to cognitive control is less developed. But even in adults there is measurable evidence that when test subjects are successful at divergent creativity that success is correlated by less activity in the regions of the brain used for high degrees of cognitive control, which is exactly what happens when we’re under the influence
On a test called the Remote Associates Test, subjects are given three apparently unrelated words and are asked to come up with a fourth word that relates all of them. When subjects don’t see an immediate solution divergent creativity becomes important.
In the study in question, the researchers found that subjects brought to a moderate level of inebriation did better on the RAT than the sober control group. Getting a bit drunk seems to weaken cognitive control and enhance insight-based creativity.
So if you have to drive or ski, don’t drink. You will get the wrong kind of flow—short cuts aren’t a good idea. But if you have to write a poem or conjure alternative uses for old household utensils, open a bottle. Wine will amplify our powers to roam freely in the world of thought and that is no mean thing.
Our freedom lies not in the absence of constraint but in our ability to think differently with a little help from our friends in the cellar.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 