Under the influence

I've been thinking about mind-altering drugs a lot recently. The workings of the brain have always fascinated me and as I've gotten older I've started to think a lot more about how we use our brains. That statistic about only using 10% of your brain has always freaked the frack out of me. I guess I hate feeling like I might not be making the most of what I have. When you're still in full time education your brain is constantly receiving new information and making connections but once you leave I think it's much harder to keep intellectually stimulated, especially if your job doesn't challenge you enough.

I read an article in the New Scientist recently about creativity. Basically the premise was that original thought is linked to daydreaming. The author argued that people who have been wholly focused on an intricate task, during which their mind isn't free to wander, score much lower in creativity tests than others. In the study that backed this, all participates were initially asked to think up creative uses for a brick. After this, they were then spilt into two groups; one of which was given a mindless, repetitive task to do, whilst the other was doing something more complicated requiring full concentration. The interesting part of the findings was that the people who had been carrying out the mindless task and been able to daydream were then able to come up with far more uses for a brick than the other group, despite many of those individuals reporting that they hadn't consciously been thinking about the task. The article concluded that it's the process of daydreaming itself, and the way that the thoughts are left free to meander, that is vital to our creative ability, rather than the content of our thoughts.

If single-minded concentration hampers creativity, the author reasoned, caffeine must act against creativity because it causes most people to focus and concentrate. But does it really? I sometimes find it harder to concentrate on one particular task after having a strong coffee, especially if the task doesn't particularly interest me. My thought processes seem to speed up and dart around, meaning that I get often get distracted easier from the task in hand but am also more able to come up with fresh ideas. If I applied my own experience to this article's findings then I'd say that coffee aids my creative thought process. As a read-a-holic English graduate and a bit of a day dreamer I'd count myself as a fairly creative person. So does caffeine literally just give the brain an indeterminate energy boast like a scattergun effect or does it actually encourage creativity itself? And if it doesn't, surely there must be other chemicals that can? *mind suddenly wanders off into futuristic world where authors are tested for banned substances like modern day athletes*.
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