Is Coffee a Help or a Hindrance to Creativity?
Coffee. I love its viscous, black, deliciousness. It’s inconceivable to me that I could begin a day without it. But when it comes to creativity, to having ideas, is it an aid or a hindrance?
Had I posed this question to the celebrated French novelist Honoré de Balzac his response would have been unequivocal. He once wrote, ‘Coffee is a great power in my life. I have observed its effects on a great scale.’ And indeed he had: during one of his frenetic bouts of writing he would rise at 1am and write until 4pm, consuming the equivalent of 50 cups of coffee along the way. That’s right. Not a typo. Fifty cups of coffee in a single day.
The celebrated author and coffee fanatic Honoré de Balzac. It’s perhaps no accident that in this portrait he appears to be experiencing a bout of indigestion.
And just as a heroin addict will graduate from chasing the dragon to shooting up when the hit of the former is no longer quite enough, Balzac came to employ ‘a horrible, rather brutal method’ where he would eat coffee grounds on an empty stomach. When he did this, ‘Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.’ Which, by the way, reads like a sentence written by a man on his 37th espresso.
Balzac was in no doubt about the efficacy of coffee as an aid to creativity. But what does modern science have to say? Well, a study by researchers at the University of Arkansas suggests that’s it not quite as simple as the French novelist thought. They discovered that participants in their trial, who’d been given a 200mg pill of caffeine - about the same as a single cup of strong coffee - showed enhanced problem solving ability but no improvement in the capacity to generate ideas. In other words, coffee helped them focus on the kind of analytical thinking we use to find solutions to specific questions, but did not help the wandering, divergent, spontaneous thinking we rely on for insights and ideas.
And this conforms to my own experience. I find coffee helpful when it comes to execution. For example, when I’ve already had an idea for a script or an article and I just need to get it down in writing. But earlier on in the creative cycle, at the idea generation stage, I find heading out into the countryside for a wander or staring mindlessly out of the window far more beneficial than a cup of the black stuff. In the early hunt for ideas, if I’m feeling a little parched, I’m much more likely to reach for a cup of tea.
Oh and I should add that if, in spite of the scientific evidence to the contrary, you’re still inclined to try Balzac’s method for yourself, then you must know that the author died at the untimely age of 51 of - you guessed it - heart failure.