It’s time to start having a drink or two with that daily lunch break. Just as many of us need coffee in the morning to wake up and sharpen our minds, it turns out that perhaps our grandparents were on to something with those boozy lunches they seemed to favor in the 50s and 60s – you see, Don Draper wasn’t an alcoholic, he was just giving his mind a little pick me up.
Recent studies by Jennifer Wiley, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago, show that a few drinks actually relax our brains and allow us to think more clearly. In her experiments, Wiley showed 24 sober people and 24 people with a blood alcohol level of .07 – which is under the legal limit – two photographs and asked both groups to find the differences between them. While both groups found the differences in equal numbers, those with a bit of booze in their bloodstream found them faster. The basic reason is because the booze helped them not overthink the solutions, thereby allowing their brains to operate more quickly.