Believe it or not, tea has a lot of inherent benefits and science has just proved that drinking it has the ability to make you more creative than the average person. If you are a keen reader, you’re probably not a stranger to the immense benefits that comes from drinking tea regularly.
A steaming cup of tea is enough to jolt you back to life in the morning, or soothe you to bed at night after a hard days work. It has worked significantly well in quelling a harsh and hacking cough or simply drank to warm your body up after a particularly brusque cold day.
There however seems to be a new reason to drink tea and it may surely top other reasons and be the the the most people need. A new study conducted in China believes that drinking tea has the ability to boost creativity, and that a cup of it could be the long-awaited remedy for the dreaded brain sludge or the creativity boost a writer needs after a block.
Researchers at Peking University’s School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences conducted tests on a sample size of 50 students who averaged around 23 in age. The participants in the study were divided into two groups: one was given a cup of black tea to drink, the other a glass of water.
After sipping the drinks, the groups underwent two tests. In the first test, both groups were tasked with designing an “attractive and creative” shape out of building blocks, while, in the second, they were required to develop a “cool” name for a new noodle restaurant.
They were then scored by non-participating students for creativity and design. The tests the groups participated in were designed to measure the student’s ability to come up with new ideas around a central topic and to think in novel and different ways.
While the criteria used in selecting “attractive,” “creative,” and “cool” may seem hazy, the beverage drinkers were able to hit the nail on the head. In both tests, tea drinkers outscored the group who had been drinking water.
The question however is what is it about the beverage that caused this advantage? The obvious answer is that black tea contains caffeine and theanine, compounds that increase cognition and improve general brain function.
Caffeine and theanine take time to affect the consumer, plus the small cups consumed by an average person doesn’t contain enough of either compounds to have had much of an effect. As such, the research team pointed to another property of tea that could be at work here which is, its ability to set a mood. The tea drinking students, they claim, were in a positive mood from the experience of sipping.
Furthermore, the report stayed that: “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.”
However, the pool of people tested—just 50— is actually very low to significantly tell of the effects of tea on the general population. It will be interesting what the findings will tell if more people were to participate in the experiment.
However, there is a link between a warm cup of the beverage and one’s mood and also between a nice green tea and the general wellbeing of a lot of people. But the question is, can tea really make you write or draw better?
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