The drink increases both divergent and convergent thinking.
Drinking hot tea instantly increases a kind of creativity called ‘divergent thinking’, research finds.
Divergent creativity refers to creating lots of potential answers to a problem.
For example, try to think of as many uses as you can for a brick.
Building a house is the obvious one, but you might also list sitting on it, using it to smash open a coconut, or painting a face on it and using it as a puppet (admittedly not a very expressive puppet!).
The more you can come up with, the more divergent creativity you display.
People in the study did a test like this after they either drank a cup of hot water or a cup of black tea.
One test involved arranging building blocks into an attractive design and another involved naming a noodle shop (it was a Chinese study).
The tea drinkers beat the hot water drinkers in both tests.
Other studies have also linked drinking tea to convergent thinking.
This is the ‘other’ type of creativity, which involves coming up with the single correct answer to a problem.
It is still a mystery, though, exactly why tea has this effect on creativity.
Tea drinkers were not in a better mood, nor was there enough caffeine or theanine to make much difference.
Also, both caffeine and theanine take more than a few minutes to kick in and people in the study did the creativity test within minutes of drinking tea.
It also couldn’t be to do with the ritual of making tea as study participants didn’t make it themselves.
The study’s authors write:
“This work contributes to understanding the function of tea on creativity and offers a new way to investigate the relationship between food and beverage consumption and the improvement of human cognition.
Two biological ingredients, caffeine and theanine, have beneficial effects on attention, which is an indispensable part of cognitive function.
But the amount of tea ingredients our participants absorbed was relatively small.
Also, theanine facilitates long-term sustained attentional processing rather than short-term moment-to-moment attentional processing.”
So the mysterious, creative effects of tea remain unexplained…
The study was published in the journal Food Quality and Preference (Huang et al., 2018).
