Tea Enhances Creativity And Intelligence, Study Finds

Researchers at Peking University in China carried out an experiment on 50 students to prove that drinking tea energizes the brain to perform better.

The 50 students were divided into two groups consisting of 25 students each and each group were given two different tasks to complete.

One group was given cups of black tea to drink while the other group was given cups of water to drink.
The first test that was given was a cognitive test, which required each group to create a design out of building blocks and the second was to come out with a brand-new name for a ramen restaurant.

When the students were done with the test, it was found that tea drinker scored a high of 6.54 points, while the water drinkers scored 6.03 points in the building block test making them .51 points shy of the tea drinkers.

In the restaurant name test, the tea drinkers scored 4.11 while the water drinkers scored 3.78 making the water drinkers .33 points shy.

“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,” the researcher said.

Researchers believe this increase in creativity is tea’s ability to create a ‘positive’ mood which sparks the brain’s cognitive regions into life.

Tea contains theanine and caffeine, which helps to boost creativity, creating alertness and attentiveness, although the effect does not start instantly.

The researcher went further to say that,

“The amount of tea ingredients our participants absorbed was relatively small. Also, theanine facilitates long-term sustained attention processing rather than short-term moment-to-moment attentional processing.”

The researchers believe that tea is a mood enhancer and that why the results worked so well in the short period.