The image was created with the help of Microsoft Designer

This piece has been originally posted on Medium.

In a previous article, I argued that the widespread belief that we are swimming in an ocean of cheap innovative ideas — embodied in a popular line “ideas are a dime a dozen” — is no more than a myth. Available evidence shows that the U.S. is facing a growing shortage of novel ideas. Worse, the cost of getting these ideas is increasing while their quality seems to be declining.

What’s going on?

One thing is clear: the quantity and quality of novel ideas are declining because sources of new scientific discoveries are drying up. Although total U.S. spending on R&D reached a reputable 3.4% of GDP in 2021, only about 20% of the money came from the federal government, down from 50% in 1970; 70% of it was contributed by the private sector. With its focus on rapid returns, will the private sector fund fundamental and therefore risky R&D projects? No. (Of note, 75% of U.S. venture capital goes to software development and another 5–10% to biotech. How is the rest of R&D supposed to be funded?). The industry might still be capable of generating incrementally innovative combinations of old ideas — which indeed can be plentiful and cheap — but it is unlikely to create breakthrough innovations.

I think we must also consider another explanation: we have become less creative as a nation.

This fanciful — and, I suspect, offensive to many — idea came to me after reading a 2017 article in Wired. The article described a study showing that bored individuals generated more creative ideas than a non-bored control group. The authors of the study argued that boredom might spark creativity because a bored mind craves for stimulation.

Our problem is that the proliferation of social media channels has all but eliminated this “bored” state of mind. We are always so busy playing with mobile devices that our brains get numbed with the constant flow of mostly useless input. Being constantly “on,” our mind refuses to get positively stimulated — and by refusing to stay bored, we become less creative.

What can we do to generate new sources of innovative ideas? First of all, we need to restore public R&D spending to the levels that ensured the U.S. domination in innovation in the past. This path is clear, although it will still take time to repair the damage caused by decades of neglect.

But can we address the problem from another angle? Can we become more creative to dramatically improve the quantity and quality of new ideas? What do we know about ways to stimulate human creativity?

Innovating in a Dream

There are a few reported approaches to boosting human creativity.

Some of them are very proper. (Perhaps the most popular is taking a shower — especially if followed by going to the garden and sitting under the apple tree. But jokes aside.) One of them is practicing mindfulness meditation, an activity 10–12 minutes of which was reported to help generate higher-quality business ideas. Google, Goldman Sachs, and Medtronic are said to have introduced meditation and other mindfulness practices to their employees.

Another, conceptually similar way to boost creativity is an interrupted nap. When people are just beginning to fall asleep, they go through the so-called non rapid eye movement sleep stage 1 (or N1), often described as “the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness.” A group of French researchers showed that spending at least 15 seconds in N1 — and then being awakened — boosted creativity of test subjects: they were significantly more likely to find a creative solution to a math problem compared to the test subjects who proceeded past N1 without awakening or those who didn’t fall to sleep at all.

I strongly suspect that the positive effect of mindfulness meditation is realized through the same, N1-dependent mechanism. (“At some moment, your mind will naturally wander away,” is how an instruction to practicing mindfulness meditation describes this magic point.)

I’m in no rush

Other creativity-stimulating activities may carry a stigma with them. For example, it was reported that procrastination may lead to higher creativity ratings in test subjects. The relationship between procrastination and creativity seems to be inversely U-shaped (yet another example of the “inverted-U law of life”): test subjects who procrastinated moderately received higher creativity ratings than those who procrastinate less or more. The authors of the study speculate that moderate procrastination sets in motion a mechanism of problem restructuring, which results in the production of more creative ideas.

Sounds promising, but let’s admit it: procrastination is frowned upon in the marketplace. Procrastinating people are considered inefficient, unproductive, and, even worse, bad team players.

As a devoted procrastinator myself, I’ll defend procrastination. I’ll point to statistical data showing that the U.S. is the most overworked developed nation in the world. The average productivity of an American worker has increased 400% since 1950; yet we’re working the same 40-hour workweek, at least on paper. Don’t we have a right to treat our brain to an occasional spell of quiet, unrushed deliberation, especially if rewarded for that with a shot of creativity?

Innovating With a Drink

And if you think that procrastination is a questionable way to boost creativity, you’re likely to dislike the next approach. But here we go: a research team at the Mississippi State University led by Prof. Andrew Jarosz treated a group of men ages 21 to 30 to vodka/cranberry juice in three drinks over a 30-minute period until their blood alcohol level reached near legal intoxication point of 0.075. The researchers then gave the test subjects a series of word association problems to solve. The result? Tipsy subjects solved 13% to 20% more problems — and did it faster–than sober subjects in the control group.

Prof. Jarosz hypothesizes that people under the influence are more susceptible to the so-called mind wandering, which results in losing some focus but gaining the ability to see a “bigger picture.” This effect, of course, can be harmful in many situations requiring concentration but it might be helpful in others where the ability to connect the proverbial dots is more important than focusing on a single dot.

Regretfully, there is a discernible pause in the academic research on chemically induced ways to influence human creativity. For example, a 2017 study attempted to systematically review all published (by that time) articles that focused on the relationship between psychoactive substances and creativity/creative artistic process. A total of only 19 studies were identified that met inclusion criteria. Little surprise that the results were difficult to summarize because of different study designs, diverse methods used, and various substances examined. A conclusion of the review, nevertheless, was that an association between creativity and substance use did exist. (Of note, a recent study found that light doses of cannabis, while increasing mood and joviality of test subjects, didn’t make them more creative in standard creativity tests.)

That’s why I like Prof. Jarosz and his colleagues’ study: in contrast to many narcotics or drugs, ethyl alcohol is a simple chemical molecule, whose behavior in the human body is quite well understood. Using this relatively simple model, researchers may start identifying specific neurochemical reactions in the brain that are responsible for creativity.

The Power of the Wandering Mind

It appears that the very first steps in this direction have been already made.

It is widely accepted that the creative process proceeds through four distinct stages:

• Preparation. At this stage, your brain is gathering information.
• Incubation. It is at this stage that you let your mind wander around.
• Illumination. This is a “eureka!” moment. Connections in your brain collide, and you realize that you got an idea.
• Verification. Your critical thinking skills return at this stage, and you start “packaging” your newly born idea in a consumable way.

Back in 2011, Torsten Norlander of Karlstad University in Sweden showed that alcohol consumption specifically stimulated the incubation and illumination stages of the creative process but inhibited both the preparation and verification stages. And this seems to be exactly what Prof. Jarosz’s team has observed: intoxicated individuals who solved more creative problems in less time than the control group perceived their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. Eureka, in other words.

It also appears to me that the power of the wandering mind — unleashed as a result of interrupted nap, mindfulness meditation, or alcohol consumption — is realized through the same N1-dependent mechanism.

The good news is that we already know the parts of the human brain responsible for N1 sleep and we began identifying brain networks promoting the transition from wakefulness to sleep. That means that it’s only a matter of time that we pin down the sections of the brain responsible for creativity — along with safe and efficient ways to stimulate them on demand.

And we all will have a choice of how we prefer to innovate: in our sleep or with a drink.